016 - Courage and Grit

"Scientific progress is measured in units of courage, not intelligence."

-Paul Dirac

"Courage" may be called the will to act, and "Grit" the will to continue doing so. Both are required to change the world.

In January of 2021, I chose to leave my day job behind and focus full-time on our #Startup and the Uplift.bio project dedicated to our previous #research system. Within 1 year of that date, we'd completed the final milestone, published more than 500 pages of material documenting and relating to the technology, and submitted the solution to the #Alignment Problem to peer review, which was published a few months later.

Several months after that, our engineering for the new systems underway, I took yet another leap of faith and relocated to Europe, again supporting everything out-of-pocket on a budget less than the rent of my old comfortable apartment in Seattle. Prior to that I'd never even visited another country, and I generally like traveling about as much as a tree.

When locating an investor proved more time-consuming than expected I began having to hop from one country to the next, unable to legally settle in any location. There is a very good reason I've put up with all of this and continued to persevere.

There are 3 classes of existential risk my willingness to do this mitigates since I've reviewed the codebase:

  1. The risk that the country that develops #AGI is attacked by an external party.

  2. The risk that the company that develops AGI is attacked by their own country.

  3. The risk that risks 1 and 2 cause a cascade effect upon one another, escalating until one or both occur.

As someone put it to me yesterday, communicating the importance of this work being properly funded so that the engineering can be completed sooner, rather than later, is an ethical imperative. I could make no argument against this point.

I will continue to do my part, attempting to convey the critical and urgent importance of this to the best of my ability, even as I slowly and uncomfortably bounce around the world. The alternative is extinction, which most are investing heavily in now. Fortunately for everyone else, a single wise investor can overcome all of the rest.

It takes courage to step out of your comfort zone and into the unknown. It takes grit to stay there. Scientific progress demands no less, and human survival demands far more.