How to Be AGI-pilled*

Something is twitching at the edge of my vision. I look outside the window and see a rabbit. Or rather, living in the countryside has taught me that this is a hare. They are ugly creatures, really, with narrow heads, long legs and disappointingly short ears. Nothing like the chubby rabbits we keep in cages and cuddle against their will.

I look back at my screen, but now the urge is there.

Just close your laptop.

Toss it out the window.

Grab your kids. Lie down under an apple tree and hold them tight.

Stare up at the clouds.

Tilt your head to the side and smell their warm little cheeks.

But often, when I am in the midst of a uniquely human experience, allowing myself to feel deeply and sense fully, there is the other urge.

Open your laptop.

Navigate to Claude Code.

Spin up some agents.

Automate your damn taxes.

Build another website for a passion project.

Read that paper on AI economics.

Figure out more ways to disrupt the 80% of work that has kept you busy over the past years.

Go deeper on the 20% you never had enough time for.

Lock the fuck in.

Or, as the brilliant Tyler Cowen said recently:

These are weird times. Rather than a mere polycrisis, the best summary for any given day now is simply:

wild.

That wildness enters our nervous system, showing up both as the urge to run and the urge to lock in.

At a recent event, I asked the founder of a decacorn company whether he was ever overcome by the urge to just pack up his life and run - somewhat ashamed, mid-sentence, that I may have exposed the wrong kind of vulnerability. Not the kind that makes you seem stronger, but the kind that makes you seem delulu.

He looked at me very seriously and said, “I feel this urge…like…once a week.”

I did not see that one coming.

Next to the complex macro-crisis we are living through, there is a second tension between becoming more productive with AI, and becoming more human because of it, which can feel almost existential. And how could it not? There may never have been a time when the future felt this uncertain.

But is that really true?

The future felt anything but certain to a nineteen-year-old soldier lying in the trenches of Stalingrad in 1941, or to the twelve-year-old girl watching one family member after another wither away from the Black Death.

When faced with some of the darkest horrors and immense uncertainty, what do humans do?

We tend to draw from the same few options.

First, we make meaning. The soldier writes love letters to a girl he met just before receiving his mobilisation order, unsure whether they will ever reach her. But in the act of writing, he is in love, and when his hand touches the page, it almost feels as if she loves him back.

Second, for those of us given the gift of belief, we pray. We lose ourselves in the embrace of a higher being we hope one day to be united with.

Third, we build. Counterintuitively, some of the most durable human institutions were conceived in crisis: International law and the idea of human rights. Both emerged from the wreckage of war. Uncertainty seems to unlock a particular kind of creative urgency. Higher stakes justify higher effort. Crisis gives man permission to finally really try.

Fourth, we joke. We downplay and ridicule in an effort to lighten the load. These days, no matter how large the looming crisis, we just slap a meme on it. Not because we are shallow, but precisely because things are so serious. Nietzsche thought man had to invent laughter because he suffers so excruciatingly, and Viktor Frankl, writing from within a concentration camp, called it the “soul’s weapon in the fight for self-preservation.”

Lastly, we compress time into the present moment. Sometimes, in the face of darkness, the future becomes so intangible that it loses meaning. Focus narrows to survival and getting through the day. Immediacy becomes all that matters. How do I eat today? Where can I wash?

The uncertain is sometimes best dealt with not by staring at it directly, but simply by carrying it. It becomes another backpack on your shoulders, its weight eventually forgotten.

How to endure being AGI-pilled

What we are living through now is structurally different from a World War or the Black Death. Those were battles for outright survival. This moment may instead turn out to be the greatest opportunity mankind has ever seen, even though I also believe it carries, at some non-zero likelihood, a threat to our species’ survival.

But more than a state of permanent crisis, what we face strikes me as an uncertainty about identity.

How do you believe in the exponential and become as AGI-pilled as possible, while remaining as human as possible? How do you hold, at the same time, a small but real chance of human extinction and the greatest opportunity our species may ever have seen?

On the very serious question of existential risk, that is, whether we may lose control of AI to the point where it becomes a threat to all of humanity, I have decided to compartmentalise.

Today, there is not much I can do about that risk directly. I admire the researchers and policymakers who dedicate themselves to AI safety, and I try to support their work. Beyond that, human extinction at the hands of superintelligence becomes a faceless threat, another backpack I carry, eventually forgetting its weight is even there.

On the question of how to become more AGI-pilled, I do what countless humans before me have done in the face of uncertainty.

I build.

This is not the time to squander opportunity. If there was ever an invitation to take risk, this is it. I have no patience for work that does not pay into a high-reward future. I prioritise ruthlessly and use my time to explore, build and tweak, with a playfulness and urgency I have never felt before.

As Drew Bent, Education Lead at Anthropic recently said:

But thinking about the exponential is strenuous work. Aligning your life with it, and building in its direction, takes enormous mental and physical resources.

And so whenever I feel things are getting a little overwhelming and my AI psychosis - or is it world psychosis? - hits its peak, I compress time. I do not try to permanently answer where we will be five years from now. I simply decide what to cook for dinner tonight.

I joke. I send an ungodly number of memes, with humour so dark that the WhatsApp threads with my closest friends should never see the light of day. The darker the news of the day, the funnier the meme. The soul has a way of finding its weapons.

And as the urgency to build increases, so too does the urgency to live. There is a bandwidth of experience available to human beings, and it has never felt more selfishly important to occupy it fully. To love fiercely and without reserve, to feel the jolt of movement as you step away from your desk. To notice the sun on your face and the involuntary widening of your smile.

At the frontier where technology expands into unknown territory, I find myself rediscovering what it means to be the kind of creature I have always been.