The future is decided by optimists

Don’t be an NPC

AI doomerism is louder than ever, some of it is just usual noise: power-hungry people trying to use fear to get more power, and some uninformed group that believes them. But the ones pushing all of this are a small, informed group of people who think they’re smart because they can imagine a few pessimistic scenarios about the future.

They see themselves as realists, in their heads they’re the only ones who understand reality while everyone else is living in a naive delusion. Ironically, it’s the other way around.

There are so many ways to understand why their position is wrong: their arguments are unfalsifiable, history is full of confident people who thought the printing press, electricity, or the bicycle would destroy society, the fact that the “AI god” is a delusion, that rooting for closed systems always leaves us worse off or that we’re living at the best point ever by any meaningful metric, making every doomer prediction age terribly.

But the simplest one is that being optimistic is just a better way to approach the future.

Pessimism makes you an NPC at best and a net negative at worst.

At best, you do nothing and just spend your life describing how things could go wrong while other people decide what actually happens. And at worst, you actively try to stop those people from building and end up slowing down civilizational progress.

The future is decided by optimists, as Kevin Kelly says.

Optimism doesn’t mean pretending problems don’t exist. Problems are a necessity by definition: without problems, there would be nothing to be optimistic about. It doesn’t mean believing the world will magically self-improve either. It doesn’t even mean believing there are fewer problems.

It just means believing problems are solvable.

Optimists see problems as inevitable and as the starting point for improving the world, risk becomes just one of the many variables to take into account while building a solution.

Pessimists identify a risk and treat it as the final verdict. Their world is defined by what can go wrong, they don’t look any farther. They congratulate themselves for being “realists” while staring at an absurdly small slice of reality, their three favorite doom scenarios are 0.00001% of the possibility space.

That’s also why, when you ask what they’re actually doing, they will proudly answer something like: “thinking about how to align and control AI.”

They see the world as something fixed where the main challenge is preventing bad outcomes and controlling what already exists.

Optimists see an open-ended world where new knowledge can be created and value isn’t fixed. They see the future as something to build instead of correctly predict and control.

That’s why optimists always end up deciding what the future looks like, they build it. And AI will just supercharge that even more.