# I'll be sad to lose the puzzles

My understanding is that even those advocating a pause or massive slowdown in the development of superintelligence think we should get there eventually[^h8kpu1m35v]. Something something this is necessary for humanity to reach its potential.

Perhaps so, but I'll be sad about it. Humanity has a lot of unsolved problems right now. Aging, death, disease, poverty, environmental degradation, abuse and oppression of the less powerful, conflicts, and insufficient resources such as energy and materials. 

Even solving all the things that feel "negative", the active suffering, there's all this potential for us and the seemingly barren universe that could be filled with flourishing life. Reaching that potential will require a lot of engineering puzzles to be solved. Fusion reactors would be neat. Nanotechnology would be neat. Better gene editing and reproductive technology would be neat.

Superintelligence, with its superness, could solve these problems faster than humanity is on track to. Plausibly way way faster. With people dying every day, I see the case for it. Yet it also feels like the cheat code to solving all our problems. It's building an adult to take care of us, handing over the keys and steering wheel, and after that point our efforts are enrichment. Kinda optional in sense, just us having fun and staying "stimulated".

We'd no longer be solving our own problems. No longer solving unsolved problems for our advancement. It'd be play. We'd have lost independence. And yes, sure, you could have your mind wiped of any relevant knowledge and left to solve problems with your own mind for however long it takes, but it just doesn't strike me as the same.

Am I making some mistake here? Maybe. I feel like I value solving my own problems. I feel like I value solving problems that are actually problems and not just for the exercise.

Granted, humanity will have built the superintelligence and so everything the superintelligence does will have been because of us. Shapley will assign us credit. But cheat code. If you've ever enabled God-mode on a video game, you might have shared my experience that it's fun for a bit and then gets old.

Yet people are dying, suffering, and galaxies are slipping beyond our reach. The satisfaction of solving puzzles for myself needs to be traded off...

The other argument is that perhaps there are problems humanity could never solve on its own. I think that depends on the tools we build for ourselves. I'm in favor of tools that are extensions of us rather than a replacement. A great many engineering challenges couldn't be solved without algorithmic data analysis and simulations and that kind of thing. It feels different if we designed the algorithm and it only feeds in our own overall work. Genome-wide association tools don't do all the work while scientists sit back.

I'm also very ok with intelligence augmentation and enhancement. That feels different. A distinction I've elided over is between humans in general solving problems vs me personally solving them. I personally would like to solve problems, but it'd be rude and selfish to seriously expect or aspire to do them all myself ;) I still feel better about the human collective[^nb749vkiwxf] solving them than a superintelligence, and maybe in that scenario I'd get some too.

There might be questions of continuity of identity once you go hard enough, yet for sure I'd like to upgrade my own mind, even towards becoming a superintelligence myself –  whatever that'd mean. It feels different than handing over the problems to some other alien entity we grew.

In many ways, this scenario I fear is "good problems to have". I'm pretty worried we don't even get that. Still feels appropriate to anticipate and mourn what is lost even if things work out.

As I try to live out the [next few years in the best way possible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X6Nx9QzzvDhj8Ek9w/a-slow-guide-to-confronting-doom), one of the things I'd like to enjoy and savor is that right now, my human agency is front and center[^xnlm0cu30y].

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/7a7c0f20e49c7ec54836365dbec402e691924dc962157d8f.png)

Eternal Children

See also [Requiem for the hopes of a pre-AI world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4pNzugqmCd9Bqj9Wu/requiem-for-the-hopes-of-a-pre-ai-world).

[^h8kpu1m35v]: I remember Nate Soares saying this, though I don't recall the source. Possibly it's in IABED itself. I distinctly remember Habryka saying it'd problematic (deceptive?) to form a mass movement with people who are "never AI" for this reason. 

[^nb749vkiwxf]: Or post-humans or anything else more in our own lineage that feels like kin. 

[^xnlm0cu30y]: The analogy that's really stuck with me is that we're in the final years before humanity hands over the keys to a universe. (From a talk Paul Christiano gave, maybe at Foresight Vision weekend, though I don't remember the year.)