Allegory of the Tsunami

What do we do when change looms on the horizon?

“The Deluge” by Francis Danby (1840)

What do we do when cataclysmic change looms on the horizon?

The year is 79 and Vesuvius is trembling.

The year is 2020 and a novel virus is discovered in Wuhan, China.

The year is 2025 and a tsunami rises up over the distant horizon, shuttering the rising sun.

It is a 2000ft wave, more gargantuan than all others in recorded history. It is an agent of transformation.

At this distance it still looks small, but you have less than 15 minutes before it crashes down on the coast. You check around - nobody else is running for the hills... You don’t want to look like a crazed alarmist - Chicken Little, yelling that the sky is falling. You sit back down.

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Will We See It Coming?

You might recognize these distant tsunamis by the ridiculously large shadows they cast over society. Your feed is abuzz with jokes about it, your friends discuss it frivolously, your parents call and ask you about it, and at work, the air quietly grows apprehensive.

Grappling with such exigent threats is a strange trip. Many of us fail to even try, preferring ignorance as the path of least resistance. When these possibilities crash against our walls of skepticism, we react instinctually such as to deny or modify their gravity. Ultimately, we are grasping desperately for a feeling of control.

In part, this is rooted in our biology—human cognition evolved to process linear changes over manageable timeframes, not the rapid, exponential growth that defines paradigm shifts today. We fall behind when we make incremental adjustments to our existing frameworks and worldview trying to fit exponential change into linear systems.

Why Do We Wait?

Mentally, we build bridges towards control by whatever means possible - rationality, reduction, substitution, avoidance etc. Often, these are really straw-man mechanisms - we’re constructing lesser models of the real thing so that we can characterize it, to know it and to be able to react to it, even if in ignorance.

We avert our eyes, because the thought of such overwhelming change is too terrifying. “These things always look worse than they are. Someone would have sounded the alarm by now if it were serious.” Sometimes, this works just fine; the tsunami turns out smaller than projected and washes harmlessly off the city bulwark. Other times, we drown.

We hunker down. We retreat into bunkers—intellectual, emotional, even physical—believing that, like the doomed citizens of Pompeii, we can weather the storm. “I’m high up enough that I’ll be safe from the danger,” we think, and sometimes it’s true: we were lucky enough to have been in the right spot. But, when the new water level is so much higher than anyone had imagined, others drown.

We justify inaction by convincing ourselves there’s more time than there truly is. “I’ll have years, decades, maybe a lifetime before it touches the shore.” And in that comfortable fiction, we continue about our lives, unbothered, as the faint roar of the approaching wave grows louder. It’s a bet made on borrowed time, and sometimes we’re right. Other times, we drown.

Perhaps, most naively, we think that just because it is currently so far away from where we stand, it will never reach us. When the first case of COVID broke out in early January, many people across the world believed it would never spread beyond Asia. But just a few weeks later, the outbreak had become a global pandemic, and the first case was discovered in the U.S. on January 21st.

This dynamic plays out at every level of society—not just individuals. Institutions, organizations, and governments, plagued by bureaucratic inertia and competing political priorities, too often fail to grasp the full scale of the challenge in time. Businesses and startups, driven by economic incentives, make no promises to be aligned with your best interests. In the end, whether from negligence, indolence, inertia, or apathy, the result is that we tend to fail to react, like a collective deer-herd-in-headlights.

Who Will Act?

Perhaps most telling is how we mythologize the few who do act decisively in these moments. We call them visionaries when they succeed, lunatics when they fail, but in either case, we mark them as different from ourselves. This creates a convenient narrative that absolves us of responsibility—after all, if only special people can see and act on these waves of change, what could we possibly have done?

This is really just a comfortable self-deception. Actually, many of us see the wave coming; we simply convince ourselves one way or another that the appropriate response is to wait for someone else to sound the alarm, build the ark, and lead the way to higher ground.

I think we can do a lot to secure a better outcome for ourselves when we suspect a wave is on the horizon. Before anything else, we should avoid knee-jerk skepticism of news, rumors, and headlines, sensational though they may be. Instead, be curious and ask questions - maybe your due diligence will unveil something of substance underneath the shroud of hype. Or maybe it won’t, but you’ll have dismissed it after having rationally evaluated the possibility, rather than having fallen victim to any of the mentalities discussed above.

If a change really is coming, early positioning is probably one of the most important factors in determining individual outcomes. Of those who found themselves facing down a tsunami, the ones who started off on higher ground and are strong swimmers had the best prospects.

Can you identify the second-order impacts of the change on you and your life? If so, maybe you can start to reorient yourself towards “higher ground”. Embracing curiosity, adaptability, and a growth mindset are general ways I can think of to “learn to swim”.

So take a good look at the horizon; get as high up as you can, and peer as far as possible. Do you see anything? Way off in the distance - are those mountains or waves?

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The Tsunami On Our Horizon

In truth, I believe super intelligent AI (or AGI as others call it) is the distant tsunami looming on our horizon today. For most of us far removed from being able to shape its trajectory, it is like a natural disaster - inevitable, intimidating, immense.

It’s rapidly approaching, faster than your information landscape is currently modeling, depicting, or projecting it to be. At this distance, it still looks small, but it’s possible that we have less than ~15 minutes years before we will be caught in the midst of a transformation to eclipse all others.

Leopold Aschenbrenner tells it incisively:

“Everyone is now talking about AI, but few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of “it’s just predicting the next word”. They see only hype and business-as-usual; at most they entertain another internet-scale technological change. Before long, the world will wake up. But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness.”