Melancholia in the San Francisco Bay Area, at least that is Scott Sumner's experience.
"During my recent trip to the Bay Area, I met lots of people who are involved in the field of AI. My general impression is that this region has more smart people than anywhere else, at least per capita. And not just fairly smart, I'm talking about extremely high IQ individuals. I don't claim to have met a representative cross section of AI people, however, so take the following with a grain of salt."
"If you spend a fair bit of time surrounded by people in this sector, you begin to think that San Francisco is the only city that matters; everywhere else is just a backwater. There's a sense that the world we live in today will soon come to an end, replaced by either a better world or human extinction. It's the Bay Area's world, we just live in it."
"In other words, I don't know if the world is going to end, but it seems as though this world is coming to an end."
#solidstatelife #ai #technologicalunemployment #existentialrisk
