How can an ordinary person prepare for AGI?

What if artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrives in just a couple of years, triggering an explosion in science and technology that transforms life as we know it?

Whether you find this timeline plausible or not, it's worth thinking through: what can an ordinary person do to prepare?

The vertical line clearly shows deep learning is hitting a wall.

It’s a scary situation, because one possibility is we all die. In that case, all you can do is try to enjoy your remaining years.

But let’s suppose we don’t die. How can you maximise your chances of surviving the transition and flourishing in whatever happens after?

Here’s the best ideas I’ve heard so far:

1. Seek out people who have some clue what’s going on. During COVID, life was suddenly upended, and every week brought confusing, high-stakes developments. Now imagine that. But lasting for a decade. And nothing goes back to how it was. In COVID, it was very helpful to know people who were ahead of the curve, and could provide reasonable advice under uncertainty. It was also very helpful to have your own basic model of what’s going on. Find the same but for AI.

2. Save as much money as you can. AGI probably causes wages to increase initially, but eventually they collapse. Once AI models can deploy energy and other capital more efficiently to do useful things, there’s no reason to employ most humans any more. At that point, you have to live on whatever you’ve saved for the rest of your (maybe longer) life. Money also has option value, which is helpful navigating a radically uncertain future. Yes if AI goes well, you might not care whether you have $10bn or $1bn. But if any goods remain scarce, it could still matter. The good news is that you have one last chance in history to make bank in the upcoming boom.

3. Invest the money in things that do well in the lead up to AGI. (Or at least that don’t do terribly.) I can’t discuss the specific investment implications, but it seems possible to do a lot better than a standard 60:40 portfolio. Here’s some other writing on the topic (which I don’t all agree with). Taking out long-dated fixed rate mortgage debt also looks more attractive (because it’ll be cheap to pay back if there’s been a ton of growth, but needn’t be super risky if AGI doesn’t happen).

4. Get citizenship of a country that’ll have lots of AI wealth. Your other option is to live off redistribution, which will likely be substantial. The government already taxes about a third of GDP, and if GDP is 100x higher, then welfare would be about 100x higher. Plus it’ll become the number one political issue. The US seems by far the best positioned country for AGI, so is the best place to be a citizen. But I expect its close allies, and especially those with parts of the AI supply chain or significant military power, get cut into a deal with the US to share the benefits. This might include the EU, UK, Japan, Korea, Australia and Canada. To be clear, I wouldn’t be surprised if the gap between the US and the rest increased, but I also don’t expect them to be totally left behind. The rest of the world will also still benefit from scientific innovation, the cost of superhuman AI services being reduced to near zero, taxing AI models deployed in their country, having energy & raw materials etc.

5. Make yourself more resilient to crazy times. I think going ‘off grid’ is overrated as a way to protect yourself from AGI risk (as with going to Mars, it won’t protect you). However, I expect an intelligence explosion will destabilise the world order, maybe leading to threats of nukes, bioweapons, cyberattack or newly invented weapons of mass destruction. So I think there’s some benefit to having somewhere you can go outside of major cities with several months of supplies, where you can go and at least feel less anxious, but in the worst case, wait out a pandemic, internet shut off or fallout cloud. In COVID, it was very helpful to be part of a group, so seek out people you could live with and who are willing to take non-common-sense actions. Investing in your mental health, groundedness and ability to deal with stress could also be worth it. That might include trying to help.

6. Prioritise things you want to be in place before AGI. The intelligence explosion likely either starts in the next 7 years, or will take much longer. And we’ll know a lot more in just 3. So delay anything you can delay 3 years, and focus only on things you’d want to do before an explosion starts. For example, if you’d like to live in both the US and Argentina at some point in your life, do the US now. If the intelligence explosion starts, you’re already 3 years into getting citizenship. If it doesn’t, you can still tango in Argentina in the 2030s. Likewise if you’re choosing between a high and lower-paid job, probably do the highly paid one next. More controversially, if it’s not a big cost to you, it could make sense to delay having children by 3 years, and have them later when uncertainty is reduced.

You might think this sounds far fetched, and of course AGI might still be decades away. That means it’s important to look for courses of action that are also fine if timelines turn out to be much longer. I think the actions above mostly are, provided you don’t take them to the extreme. (While spending all your money on a final 3 year binge is not.)

You still have some years left – so use them to prepare as best you can. (And if you want to help society as a whole navigate the transition, see here.)

I’m keen to hear more ideas in the comments. I also hope to write more about them, so subscribe to get notified.