Eleven Practical Ways to Prepare for AGI

How should you live differently today if superhuman AI is coming soon?

My research focuses on the roadmap to artificial general intelligence (AGI)—broadly superhuman AI that I assess is likely to arrive by the end of the 2020s, and very probable within a decade. If created without proper safety precautions, there’s a real and serious risk that AGI could go rogue and cause an apocalyptic catastrophe like an extinction-level pandemic. But if built safely, it could unlock unprecedented and broadly-shared material abundance, solve climate change and resource scarcity, and achieve astounding medical breakthroughs that let us live dramatically longer lives in good health. When I talk about such sci-fi sounding futures in this line of work, people often respond something like: “Well that all sounds great and/or terrifying, but supposing you’re right, what should I do differently in my daily life?” So I’ve compiled eleven practical ways you should live your life differently today if AGI is on the horizon.

Take the Italy trip. As I’ve argued elsewhere, AGI means that the future will either go very well or very badly. If it goes well, you will probably enjoy much greater material abundance than you do today. So if you put off that family trip to Italy to save your money, that money will provide a much smaller relative boost to your quality of life in 2040 than if you took the trip today. And if AGI goes badly, you could be literally killed—an outcome well-known to make tourism impossible. Either way, take the trip now. This doesn’t mean you should max out all your credit cards and live a life of short-sighted hedonism. But it does mean that your relative preference for spending money today to saving it for decades from now should be a lot stronger than in worlds where AGI weren’t coming. Concretely, if you’re in your 30s or younger, you’ll usually be better off spending any dollar you make today than waiting to spend it after 2050.

Minimize your lifestyle risks. If you’re 35 and get on a motorcycle, you are—at least implicitly—weighing the thrill and the cool factor against the risk of losing about another 45 years of expected life. But AGI medical advances will let people live healthy lives far longer than we currently expect. This means that by riding the Harley you might be risking several times as many years as you intended. If that’s your greatest bliss in life, I’m not telling you to never do it, but you should at least consciously weigh your choices in light of future longevity. For Americans ages 15-44, about 58% of mortality risk comes from three causes: accidents, suicide, and homicide. You can dramatically cut your own risk by limiting risky behaviors: avoid motorcycles, don’t binge drink or do hard drugs, don’t drive drunk or drowsy or distracted, attend to your mental health, and avoid associating with or especially dating violent people. Yes, AGI also means that long-term risks like smoking are probably less deadly for young people than current statistics suggest, but smoking still hurts your health on shorter timescales, so please don’t.

Don’t rush into having kids. Many women feel pressure to have children by a certain age for fear they’ll be infertile thereafter. This often leads to settling for the wrong partner. In the 2030s, fertility medicine will be much more advanced, and childbearing in one’s 40s will be roughly as routine as for women in their 30s today. So Millennials’ biological clocks are actually ticking much slower than people assume.

Back up irreplaceable data to cold storage. As AI gets more powerful, risks increase that a sudden cyberattack could destroy important data backed up in the cloud or stored on your computer. For irreplaceable files like sentimental photos or your work-in-progress novel, download everything to storage drives not connected to the internet.

Don’t act as if medical conditions are permanent. Doctors often tell sick or injured people they will “never” recover—never see again, walk again, be pain-free again. AGI-aware decisionmaking treats medical “never” statements as meaning “not for 5-20 years.” Most paralyzed people middle-aged and younger will walk again. This also implies that patients should often prioritize staying alive versus riskier treatments aimed at cures today. It also gives reasonable hope to parents considering abortion based on predictions that a disabled child will have lifelong suffering or debility.

Don’t go overboard on environmentalism. AGI or not, we all have an obligation to care for the earth as our shared home. Certainly be mindful of how your habits contribute to pollution, carbon emissions, and natural resource degradation. But AGI will give us much, much better tools for fighting climate change and healing the planet in the 2030s and 2040s than we have today. If you can give up a dollar worth of happiness to help the environment either today or a decade from now, that dollar will go a lot farther later. So be responsible, but don’t anguish over every plastic straw. Don’t sacrifice time with your family by taking slower public transport to trim your CO2 impact. Don’t risk dehydration or heat stroke to avoid bottled water. Don’t eat spoiled food to cut waste. And probably don’t risk biking through heavy traffic just to shrink your carbon footprint.

Wean your brain off quick dopamine. Social media is already rewiring our brains to demand constant and varied hits of digital stimulation to keep our dopamine up. AGI will make it even easier than today to get those quick hits—for example, via smart glasses that beam like-notifications straight into our eyes. If you’re a slave to these short-term rewards, even an objectively amazing future will be wasted on you. Now is the time to seek sources of fulfillment that can’t be instantly gratified. The more joy you find in “slow” activities—like hiking, tennis, reading, writing, cooking, painting, gardening, making models, cuddling animals, or having great conversations—the easier it will be to consume AGI without letting it consume you.

Prioritize time with elders. We know that our years with grandparents and other elders are limited, but the implicit pressure of our own mortality often pushes us to skip time with them in favor of other things that feel fleeting—job interviews, concerts, dates. If you expected to live to a healthy 200 due to longevity medicine, but knew that most people now in their 80s and 90s wouldn’t live long enough to benefit, you’d probably prioritize your relationships with them more than you do now. There’ll be plenty of time to hike the Andes later, but every moment with the people who lived through World War II is precious.

Rethink privacy. There’s an enormous amount of data being recorded about you that today’s AI isn’t smart enough to analyze, but AGI will be. Assume anything you do in public today will someday be known by the government, and possibly by your friends and family. If you’re cheating on your spouse in 2026, the AGI of 2031 might scour social media data with facial recognition and find you and your paramour necking in the background of a Korean blogger’s food review livestream. It would be like what happened to the Astronomer CEO at the Coldplay concert last year, except for anyone in the crowd—no need to wind up on the jumbotron. And not only with facial recognition. The vein patterns under our skin are roughly as uniquely identifying as fingerprints, and can often be recovered from photos or video that show exposed skin, even if not obvious to the naked eye. So if you’re doing something you don’t want the government to tag you with, don’t assume you can stay anonymous on camera as long as your face isn’t visible.

Foster human relationships. When AGI can perform all the cognitive tasks humans can, the jobs most resistant to automation will largely revolve around human relationships. The premium will grow on knowing many people, and being both liked and trusted by them. Although it’s hard to predict exactly how automation will unfold, honing your people skills and growing your social circles are wise investments. But human relationships are also central to life itself. Even if AGI gives you material abundance without work, such as via some form of universal basic income, human relationships are essential to the experience of life itself. If you are socially isolated, AGI will give you endless entertainments and conveniences that deepen your isolation. But if you build a strong human community, AGI will empower you to share more enriching experiences together and come to know one other more fully.

Grow in virtue. In the ancient and medieval worlds, physical strength was of great socioeconomic importance because it was essential to working and fighting. Gunpowder and the Industrial Revolution changed all that, making strength largely irrelevant. In the modern world, intellect and skill are hugely important to both socioeconomic status and our own sense of self-worth. We’re proud of being good at math or history or computer programming. But when AGI arrives, everyone will have access to superhuman intelligence and capability, cheaper than you can imagine. In that world, what will set humans apart is virtue—being kind, being wise, being trustworthy. Fortunately, virtues can be cultivated with diligent effort, like training a muscle. The world’s religious and philosophical traditions have discovered numerous practices for doing this: volunteering and acts of service, meditation or prayer, fasting and disciplined habits, expressing gratitude, listening humbly to criticism, forming authentic relationships with people of different backgrounds, studying the lives of heroically virtuous people, and many more. Explore those practices, commit to them, and grow in virtue.