My Ambitions as a Mother
Motherhood on the Cusp of the Singularity: Part 1
Parenting, at least in my experience, has felt urgent and momentous. I’ve relied on intuition, raw instincts, and my experience to guide my ambitions as a mother. I’ve approached it as something I can study, master, graduate from, and yes, fail at.
And so, much of the first five years was spent chasing developmental milestones, so much so that it accelerated and compressed that time. In retrospect, a singular and joyous time. A time I wish I had just enjoyed watching her and being with her.
I didn’t know that I would later have regrets and wish to go back. This time, I’d think, I will focus solely on bearing witness to her presence and growth. With no need for cataloging or measuring or worrying. After all, we know billions of other children achieve their milestones, including me, without a mother ever setting out to track them.
One night in August 2024, I happened to be lying there scrolling through my phone and saw someone share Leopold Aschenbrenner article, ""Situational Awareness."
So, I clicked on the link and I began to read it and I felt the world shift. I got up and walked to my living room, stunned. As I read his reflections on my couch, my apartment felt suddenly too quiet, quiet in the way the world must have sounded to mothers huddled over radio broadcasts announcing Sputnik or the first atomic test. I kept glancing around at my empty living room.
One immediate consequence is that I used to think about what kind of future I want for her; these days, I find myself thinking more about what future will even be possible. And among those possibilities, what kind of mother engaged in what kind of parenting best prepares her?
Updating my Maternal Ontology
Today, I think a lot about that the mother I am, the parenting style I have, the worldview, and the experiences that have shaped me and wonder if me, as I am, is ill-equipped to make the choices and decisions in the present that will help her thrive in 2050, when she is 32, whatever version of the timeline may come to fruition.
I am deeply, deeply aware that in this moment, my choices and decisions are more consequential and that even more disquieting is the stark understanding that confident choices now may foreclose and narrow the field of choices later.
As a pre-superintelligence mother, we have a sepia-toned atlas to guide our children into flourishing futures; the coastlines are already wrong. What does an updated atlas look like? And how do we go about building and constructing it?
We know love, safety, autonomy, and sunshine are essential. We’ll strive to raise them to be polite and curious members of their communities, and we’ll work to shape their characters to avoid the downsides of our own.
But beyond that, what else should we be thinking and doing? We may need to update our maternal and parenting ontologies. But how?
One thing is clear to me: we must articulate a vision of the world and establish some guiding principles to inform our new ontologies. I am still in the early stages, but nearly nine months after reading Situational Awareness and spending months reading, writing, and reflecting, I have developed some tentative positions that I am using to guide my ontological updates.
My Current Positions
I am taking the position that uploading my daughter’s consciousness, or yours, into the cloud, or its future configuration, is not sufficient for preserving her essence, whatever it may be, and that, therefore, a move away from the biological towards the mechanical is an insufficient substitute for life and love as I understand it.
This means, then, that I will not work toward a world where we replace ourselves with machines. I do not believe that to be an optimal outcome, even if we are less fragile and nearly immortal in these other forms.
I am taking the position that Earth and the universe would not be better off without homosapiens. I am doing so, fully aware that it may be speciesist, and that, by some measures, we may be the most destructive invasive species on Earth. While finding Robert Sapolsky's work in Behave to be compelling, I am hopeful that we are not beyond redemption.
This means, then, that I will work towards a world of material abundance and health that opens up possibilities to be our best selves collectively.
I am taking the position that it is essential and valuable to spend time contemplating the future from a humanities perspective. In a world where emotional intelligence and empathy are becoming increasingly critical, civilizationally consequential deliberations must incorporate a prominent humanities perspective.
This means I will devote time to poetry, reading, and writing, and I will utilize my philosophical training to examine the world around me. I will share my learnings digitally, while also creating spaces in the real world to facilitate these conversations.
I am taking the position that the voice of the peasants must be preserved. I am a techno-optimist- realist from the peasant class. There was barely enough room in this version of the timeline for me and mine to exist freely. I am well aware that there are techno-accelerationists who can’t wait to accelerate into a future where they can ensure many of us don’t join them. I am also well aware that there are still many of us in this timeline whose considerations about the future and their ability to participate in shaping what is to come are severely limited because they operate on time horizons that are so short, on the order of hours, days, or weeks. And they do so, not by choice, but by pure necessity, inescapable drudgery, and the utter misfortune of being born in the wrong place or wrong time.
This means I will work to build a future that expands the field of choices and possibilities and the likelihood of flourishing and thriving for as many people as possible. I will do so for even those who don’t recognize my humanity, because they are not my standard.
Instead of beliefs, I am going to take positions. Positions must be defended or they will erode; they must evolve or they will diminish; they require proactive learning and expansion.
Beliefs are just held.
In a moment like this, I can’t just hold beliefs.
Additional Readings
Since then, several additional attempts have been made to raise global salience about the potential impacts of superintelligence and the urgency of acting now, as well as what might happen if things go wrong. I’ve shared a few of the things I have spent the last 9-months reading.
If you didn’t catch the Tupac Reference, “My Ambitionz as a Ridah”