It dramatically affects our priorities.

In 2014, Soares left the tech industry and took one-third of his previous salary to work on this problem, because it seemed important and because few other people were working on it. And he was over a decade late relative to Yudkowsky, who founded MIRI in 2000 when he was about twenty years old, and has dedicated his life to the issue. So, yes, it affects our daily lives.

Are we saving for retirement? Our investments and other factors from outside MIRI are doing well enough that we’d be financially fine even if we retired tomorrow, and even if the world lasted into our old age. So the question of whether we’re putting our money into 401(k)s isn’t very informative. That said: No, we are not putting our money into 401(k)s.

Some people like to say that if we really believed what we said, then (aside from dedicating our lives to it) we’d also be [insert some scheme that they believe constitutes an appropriate response]. Why not just take out giant thirty-year loans that we’ll never have to repay, if we’re so confident that the world will end before then?

The answer, of course, is that these are bad ideas. Suppose we went to a bank and said, “We’d like to take out a very large loan. We’re going to blow it all on schemes to make the world realize the danger of artificial superintelligence, and/or on a luxury lifestyle, which from your perspective will look roughly equivalent to lighting the money on fire. Our plan for paying it back with interest is that we expect to be dead, so it won’t be our problem.” No bank is going to underwrite that loan. And no, we’re not going to pretend we have a viable business idea and lie about whether we’d be paying the loan back.

Yudkowsky has elsewhere articulated a pattern we see, where an insistence that we follow some supposedly-obvious end-of-the-world get-rich-quick scheme stems from a clueless understanding of investment. We expect that these people aren’t thinking through whether they’d make these bets if they had our beliefs. It’s almost never people who actually understand the risks suggesting these wacky schemes.

Living in the shadow of annihilation doesn’t have to make you stupid. And it doesn’t have to make you give up on fighting annihilation, or give up on fully living the life that you have for however long you have it.

See also the very end of the book for more on this topic.