Dreams, cleverness and the gallows

Last night I dreamed that I was on death row, slowly taken out toward the gallows. I hadn't really done anything wrong. Suddenly my execution was just sort of about to happen. Everyone thought I must have some clever plan to escape - so most of my dream was taken up scheming to cheat death. If I was sneaky and clever enough, I'm sure I could think of something.

And now I'm awake. At some point I'm going to get old and die. I won't die because I'll deserve it. I'll die because this dreamy life might end before I think of a clever escape from death. We're probably in one of the last generations to ever die - how sad is that!

I should shoulder some of that burden. We all should; its sensible. I don't want to leave my potential immortality up to the cleverness of strangers and their willingness to share. Seriously - what do we need to do? Because I'm having way too much fun, and it would just be so sad if I die stupidly because we're too busy partying to be clever.

And I know all that. I've been talking about this stuff, and my crazy AI ideas for basically ever. When will I actually write that code? The most recent HPMOR chapters have kicked me with this stuff again. If I catch some terminal illness in a few years, I will look back on my time now with disgust - as wasted years that I could have been saving my life. Or worse, if someone I love dies because right now I'm spending my life making hiring software instead of AI, then what? There's a gun pointed at my head and yours. Every day there's a small chance it will go off. Today, I'm ignoring it and building cool concurrency systems instead. But we should do something about that gun. If we don't, we will all die, 100%.

We're all on the way to the gallows. Its time to come up with something clever.