Russell Newman 🚀 Engineer & Author 📚

realizing i might be part of the last pre-singularity generation. it is so surreal to be in this razor-thin slice of time and humanity that gets to experience both extremes. i’m 37 years old. i grew up with no computer, no internet, no tv. we played under the sodium street lamps. no phones, just library books. i remember memorizing entries in the encyclopedia britannica, then the 56k modem screech. i’ve gotten to witness this whole arc. a genuinely pre-digital childhood, and now whatever this is becoming. it’s just so bizarre to hold all those memories and contrast them with the current state. now i speak into a slab of silicon and glass and it manifests code like water flowing down a hill. i commune with this alien intelligence on a daily basis. same head, same lifetime. i increasingly feel like a three-dimensional being looking at this multidimensional, crystallized artifact of intelligence that is increasingly beyond my comprehension. i can interact with the little slice facing me, but have less and less intuition for the shape of the whole thing. if i was positioning myself in a replay of the lead-up to what might be the most significant event in modern human history, i’m not sure i would choose any other years. old enough to remember what came before. young enough to have a lot of life left inside whatever comes next. sama was talking about the excitement and the melancholy. a feeling of something ending. Cheeky Pint it feels like we’re on the precipice of handing over the torch of intelligence to something nonhuman. it’s an extreme viewpoint, but it feels like we’re hurtling uncontrollably towards this singularity. it doesn’t feel real. it probably won’t be a singular, definable moment, but a slow-motion event of gradual realization, with occasional shockwaves. to quote a great scholar of our times. “not enough people are emotionally prepared for if it’s not a bubble”