The role of spirituality in working on existential risk
It’s not easy working on the world’s most pressing problems.
Even as I write that first sentence, a great surge of insecurity comes up in me. The insecurity says: But I’m not actually working on the world’s most pressing problems myself yet, so how can I write such an audacious sentence, pretending as though I am? What will people think of me boldly proclaiming that I know something about the difficulties of working to reduce existential risk, and beyond that something about the solution to these difficulties? Surely they will dismiss me as insincere, as a poser, as a wannabe.
This insecurity arises because stepping up to work on reducing existential risk means taking up a high aspiration — that of being in service to all life — and living a non-self-centered life based on that aspiration. As we try to hold this aspiration, and particularly as we hold it in the glaring lights of public discourse, we naturally see our own shortcomings more clearly. We begin to see exactly how much more effort is required to truly give everything for the sake of protecting life on Earth. We see exactly how enormous the problem is, and exactly how absolutely necessary it is that we do in fact dedicate ourselves to its resolution. And we see how far short we have fallen so far in our lives.
But we do not need to work through all this alone. There are communities and traditions that have a great deal to say about how to overcome the hindrances that naturally arise when we attempt to put our lives into alignment with an aspiration that cares about more than just ourselves. The name for this particular field of expertise is, roughly, spirituality. Far from being an abstract or esoteric pursuit, real spiritual traditions make highly practical and concrete recommendations for how to live an altruistic life. And the best of these traditions do not prescribe which particular aspirations one ought to hold, but instead offer their practical wisdom so that each person may live up to the aspirations they discover in themselves. In my own path to working on existential risk I have found the wisdom of spiritual communities immensely helpful. In this essay I will share some of what I have found most insightful.
Struggling with the calling
I came upon Nick Bostrom’s TED talk a little over 12 years ago, just as I was finishing up my undergraduate degree in my hometown of Adelaide, Australia. I had been accepted to graduate school in robotics at Oxford, but I had not yet left the cocoon of my childhood home. I was living with my parents and I enjoyed watching intellectual videos late into the night.
Nick Bostrom’s talk was about the truly big problems facing humanity, and they were much bigger than what I had encountered before. He spoke not just of existential risk but of the promise of a post-human future of unimaginable significance. He identified death itself as a problem that we ought to overcome. He demonstrated a perspective so much broader than my own that I could not help but fall in love with the calling I heard in his words: the calling to guide life on Earth to its rightful place among the stars.
Luckily for me, Bostrom happened to be based in Oxford, at the Future of Humanity Institute, and I had the opportunity to spend time interacting with his philosophy group during my graduate studies (though I was never formally affiliated with the group). I would ride my bicycle to their office and take part in seminars and study groups on topics such as artificial intelligence, whole brain emulation, and existential risk. During this time Bostrom wrote Superintelligence, his book on the risks that artificial intelligence poses to humanity and all life on Earth, and I was invited to attend some of the seminars in which he presented early versions of ideas from the book.
The grandeur of the project being undertaken had me fall completely in love. I wanted to help solve these problems of vast significance, and as a graduate student in robotics I felt that I was well-placed to contribute. Towards the end of my doctorate, one of the researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute encouraged me to apply to a research position that had just opened up at the institute. But I did not apply. The calling was clear, but at this juncture I did not answer it.
Instead, I followed an older and simpler aspiration to work in software development in the exciting world of technology startups. This aspiration I had held for many more years, was more familiar to me, was more similar to my father’s life trajectory. It had the comforts of being an exciting adventure — moving to New York City — without being too dangerous. I was recruited by a computer vision company working on software for the iPhone, and they offered me far more money than I had ever earned before.
But as I began this work, a deep grief overcame me. I did not understand this grief at the time. I would discuss the big compelling issues with my coworkers and found that they were just not very interested in digging into them with me. We all led hectic lives and were all struggling in various ways with the loneliness of making our way in the fast-moving world of technology and salaried work, and there just wasn’t a lot of energy left over to fall in love with being of great service to the world.
I felt this great love that I had been introduced to at Oxford fracture and ossify in my heart, and it was the worst thing I had ever felt. I still remember the cold desperation of feeling this part of me die, to be replaced with a studious well-behaved persona that was well-conditioned to corporate life. I thought at the time that this was a necessary part of growing up: that becoming an adult meant giving up on fanciful notions of participating in the homecoming of life in the cosmos and instead meant taking up a careful and protective approach to all communication in which one does not speak unless one needs to, and when one does it is from a place of cautious control.
Oh the pain of these dark times! I fell further and further into ossification. I entered into bad relationships. I entered into vice and addiction. I tried to hold at bay the pain of living with this unmet calling in my heart by constructing a life of comfort. I was successful in my work and was highly sought after by technology companies, and as a result I was able to construct a great deal of comfort for myself, which further trapped me in this awful lonely place of alienation from the calling.
Light
But no matter how much control we cultivate in our lives, we do not ultimately have true control over how our lives unfold. It is a delusion, and thank goodness for that.
In the end the thing that broke the dam was actually falling in love. I met somebody whose presence moved me in a way that I did not know that I could be moved. I thought that I was too old for that kind of thing (yes, at age 30 I really believed this). I thought I knew what love was, and I thought it was a kind of dutiful commitment to trudging through a bleak existence with someone else who was equally weary and appalled by life. I thought love was a biological thing of no true or fundamental significance. I thought love was a kind of contract. The experience of actual love destroyed these layers of complacency and delusion like a great thunderstorm sweeping aside a house built from matchsticks. The concrete around my heart was obliterated and the old calling, it turned out, had not died but was merely asleep.
I began the long painful process of facing what had become of my life, of turning back towards integrity, and of taking practical steps towards answering the calling to work on the world’s most pressing problems. At the time I was running a small robotics company and I vowed that however long that project took to complete, I would work next on safeguarding the future of life on Earth, whatever that might mean.
I began meeting with myself for two hours each week in what I called “existential risk concentration time”, where I would sit in front of my laptop with a blank document and work out what was really up with the world and with my life in relation to it. Often I would flounder for an hour or more. It was never clear how to get started or what I should spend this time on, or even how I might start answering this question, but I found that if I just sat there for two hours and refused to move attention away from the unnamed unspeakable question of my life, answers would come. And slowly my life began to shift.
I left a bad relationship. I left behind my house and sold most of my belongings. My company ran out of money and was acquired by a larger robotics company. I worked for this larger company for a year, earned enough money to support myself without a salary for a few years, then I quit. I moved into a small cottage in Berkeley with the intention to discover how to be of service within the small community of people I knew who were working to safeguard the future of life on Earth.
Living alone versus living in community
I quickly discovered that living a life of pure service to all life is not such a simple undertaking. It requires more than a good heart and a nice aspiration. Much more.
At first I tried to do it alone. In my Berkeley cottage, I tried to keep my new life simple and minimal. I would spend a few hours each day contemplating and writing about AI safety. At certain times I would feel the presence of the calling and words would pour out of me. But while this was happening I was also going through a difficult divorce and I became more and more anxious about whether I would be left with enough money to support myself. I was terrified that I would somehow be forced to go back to working a salaried job. This anxiety grew and grew and sapped more and more of my energy, and I spent less time in the presence of the calling and more time trying once again to make my life conform to a picture I had of it.
It is not easy to let go of the pictures we hold of how our lives should be. It is not at all easy to remember the calling at each moment in our lives. How can we remember our calling and let our lives be in service to it? How can we remember what true love really is? It turns out that we do not have to answer these questions alone. There are those who have struggled mightily with these tasks, and have discovered how to do it, and have chosen to spend their lives teaching others how to do it. I met one such teacher just when I most needed his guidance.
In June of 2020 I went to a talk at Leverage Research — a research group working on existential risk reduction — by a monk named Soryu Forall. The talk was on the topic of monasteries and whether they have historically been powerful. I was impressed by Soryu although to this day I could not say what exactly it was about him that I was impressed by. In that first talk I thought most of what he said was probably wrong, and beyond that I became angry as I listened to him. But there was something about him that was just obviously right; obviously the way; obviously the truth. I made the decision to meditate with his community during the mornings when they met to sit and eat together.
And in this way I stopped trying to work out how to answer the calling alone, and began discovering how to do it in community. It was not at all how I expected. The meditation group led by Soryu met each morning at 5:30am to chant together for an hour by the nearby lake, then we would sit in meditation together for two hours, and then we would eat a vegan breakfast together. There was no time for chit-chat before, during, or after any of this. Breakfast was usually eaten in noble silence. I came to know and love a small group of regular attendees, yet in some cases I did not know their names because there just was not space for the normal “hi what do you do?” kind of conversation. Instead I discovered that a different and deeper kind of connection emerged simply by sitting and eating together each morning.
Soryu would give guidance at the beginning of meditation sessions. He would speak of tearing down the walls of our minds, of giving ourselves to great love, of throwing ourselves into the practice completely, of letting go of all delusions of safety and self-importance, of giving up our lives in service to all life. He exhorted us to make use of every moment, to break through our delusions during this sit, during this breath, during this moment. He gave voice to the calling that dwelt in each of our hearts and in this way connected us with what we already knew to be true. I found that I wasn’t being asked to believe some particular words spoken by a teacher; I was instead being asked to follow his words into my own heart and trust that which I could directly verify as true and good.
And in different ways the whole community expressed the calling throughout the morning schedule. It was expressed in the love we showed for each other through preparing and sharing meals, in the tenderness with which we welcomed newcomers into the group, in the gentle correcting of each other when we were late or sluggish or lazy in our duties.
It is tremendously difficult to remember and live by our calling in each and every moment, but by living in a spiritual community we can embed ourselves in a deeper pool that reconnects us to our calling each time we forget it. Over time, as we mature spiritually, we can carry our calling alone in the world for longer and longer periods of time. But ultimately we must come back into community or else we are likely to forget our calling and wander off into the desert of bleak isolation.
This capacity for remembering one’s calling is referred to in Buddhist scriptures as recollection or mindfulness (the Sanskrit word is smṛti). It is relevant to all who seek to live a true and noble and happy life. But it is particularly relevant to those working to reduce existential risk, since this work is often seen as strange or abstract or uncompelling by broader society, and so it is particularly important that we stay connected to our calling.
Spiritual communities have real practical knowledge about how one can stay connected to one’s calling. They integrate simple and practical spiritual practices into the daily routine, such as meditation, chanting, cooking, cleaning, and eating together. Wise spiritual communities understand that it is inevitable that we will lose track of our calling and slide off into grief and despair. They understand that the way to solve this is by living with friends who know how to reconnect us with our calling, and who love us enough to notice when this is needed.
Anxiety and despair
When we work to reduce existential risk, we are presented each day with the reality of what could go terribly wrong in the world. We choose to place our attention on the world’s most pressing problems, and as a result these problems become salient and immediate rather than vague and distant. This is a good and necessary thing, but it can lead to a great deal of fear, anxiety, and despair as we become intimate with the possible future extinction of all life on Earth.
There are two unhealthy ways and one healthy way to relate to this anxiety. The first unhealthy way is by pushing it away, telling ourselves that everything is actually okay, that there is really nothing to fear, that it is okay for us to continue living our lives unmoved by the risks of great tragedy that we see. This way, which I will call leaning away from anxiety and despair, is unhealthy because by pushing away certain evidence, we end up with a distorted understanding of existential risk. And from this place of resistance to evidence we are likely to make decisions and take actions that are less wise than if we were willing to look honestly at all evidence.
The second unhealthy way is that we view anxiety and despair as markers of our noble commitment to being open to all evidence. We tell ourselves that things really are terrible and that therefore it’s good and right to feel anxiety and despair. We may view those who don’t exhibit obvious signs of anxiety as lacking the tenacity to realize just how troubling the situation is. I will call this way leaning towards anxiety, and it is just as harmful as leaning away. The harm comes because when we are subject to anxiety and despair, we take actions that are less beneficial than when we are energetic and clear-minded. A rock climber facing a dangerous situation is best served by bringing full awareness and energy to clear-minded decision-making in light of all available evidence concerning their predicament. They are not well-served by spending time having anxious thoughts or processing anxious feelings. Furthermore, anxiety and despair tend to sap energy away, and energetic action is critical to getting out of their predicament. Similarly, making decisions concerning existential risk from a place of anxiety and despair clouds our judgement and biases us towards inaction.
The healthy way is to receive all evidence fully, process it completely, and take appropriate action from a place of energy and clarity. If anxiety and despair arise during this process then we let them arise and then let them go. Perhaps there is some evidence bound up with the anxiety and despair, in which case we receive this evidence fully. But we neither lean away from these feelings, resisting their arising and making decisions in service of not feeling that which we do not want to feel, nor do we lean towards these feelings, resisting their passing away and taking them to be some marker of our commitment to truth, in which case our decisions become fearful and lethargic. In Buddhist spirituality, this approach is referred to as equanimity.
Equanimity is not about indifference. It is not about being unmoved by the world around us. It is about being moved completely by all evidence available to us, and yet retaining a cool-headed stability that permits clear and energetic decision-making. Spiritual traditions have much to teach us about practical methods for cultivating equanimity.
Focus
After experiencing the nourishment of practicing regularly with a spiritual community, I decided to spend some time living in a monastery. Soryu’s main home is the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth (MAPLE) based in northern Vermont. An off-shoot monastery called the Organization for Awakening and Kindness (OAK) is located in the Berkeley hills in California. I decided to spend a few months living and practicing full-time first at OAK, then MAPLE.
During my time at these monasteries I decided that in addition to the monastic training I would receive, I would undertake research into AI safety in my free time. I committed to spending an hour each day doing research.
What I discovered is that the clarity of mind cultivated in monastic training is highly conducive to staying focussed and vigorous while doing research. It is extremely easy to begin a research period trying to answer some research question, and then quickly slide off into some other related but much less valuable activity. For example, I might start out trying to understand what exactly intelligence is, have one or two small insights, and then just minutes later I would be thinking about how great it would be to share these insights with my friends, or perhaps I would be experiencing insecurity about the shallowness of my insights, or I would be planning out how I might leverage the insights to gain attention within the research community.
Some of these cognitive activities were healthy and worthwhile, while others were unhealthy and not worthwhile, but none of them were the original research task that I had set out to accomplish at the beginning of the session. I saw that out of 60 minutes blocked out for research, it was all too easy to spend 10% or less of the time focussed on the actual research question! Furthermore, these alternative cognitive activities had a flavor of relatedness to the original research task — they weren’t simple distractions like checking email or going to make coffee — so it was easy to fool myself into thinking that I had been more focussed than I actually had.
As my monastic training unfolded, I became better at noticing when I had veered off the original research task and gently bringing myself back. This capacity is cultivated in meditation practice as we practice holding attention on a single focus area, such as the breath. In meditation we develop this capacity at a non-cognitive level, so that by holding attention on the breath we ultimately cut off all thoughts entirely. In my experience I found that this carried over to cognitive activities such as research extremely well.
Renunciation
The modern world is full of powerful incentives. Many of these threaten to pull us away from doing important long-term work and instead direct our efforts towards work that is legible and profitable to society over shorter time horizons. There is nothing wrong with legible and profitable work, but the strength of the incentives for this kind of work, together with the relatively weaker incentives for doing truly long-term work, mean that if we are guided only by incentives then our energies will not be directed towards that which is most important.
The only sustainable way to ensure that our efforts are not redirected by the incentives offered to us by society is to stop craving that which is offered. We must let go of our craving for wealth, power, sex, comfort, independence, safety, food, warmth, and all other sense pleasures. That is: we must ensure that our minds do not subtly view these sense pleasures as surrogate terminal values. It is fine to acquire money, food, independence, etc as an instrumental resource in service of our calling. But we often tell ourselves that we are acquiring these things for their instrumental value when our actions show that in fact we are treating them as ends in their own right.
Renunciation is a great relief, as it frees us to finally pursue our calling unmolested by the constant seeking for sense pleasures. We discover that the joy that can be acquired through sense pleasures is tiny compared to the joy of living up to our highest aspirations. We see that we never really wanted sense pleasures in their own right, we just unconsciously sought after them due to layers of habit.
But how does one truly let go of craving for money? For power? For food and warmth? These cravings do not exist in our high-level verbal-reasoning minds, and so they cannot be let go by these high-level faculties alone.
Spiritual traditions teach the subtle art of renunciation as a practical endeavor. In the Buddhist tradition, one of the many ways that one practices renunciation is by periodically entering into retreat, in which one puts aside everything — work, travel, entertainment, talking, tasty food — and commits to focus exclusively on practice for a period of a days, weeks, months, or years. It turns out that it is not so easy to let go of these things, and a laundry list of attachments is revealed as one sees each remaining attachment clearly. By seeing each attachment clearly, and seeing their non-necessity clearly, the mind naturally becomes willing to renounce each attachment, slowly, often painfully, one-by-one.
Spirituality is practical
Many of my friends view spirituality as an abstract, high-level, esoteric pursuit. This is understandable: the teachings of spiritual traditions often seem difficult to grasp when read in a book, and when we hear something that is difficult to grasp we naturally imagine that it is like the difficult-to-grasp concepts of science and math to which we are acculturated and that it therefore requires the same kind of journey through increasingly esoteric concepts that would be required to develop an understanding of, say, quantum field theory, or algebraic geometry.
My experience of spiritual training has in fact been more like working with a vigorous and wise tennis coach, except that instead of learning to play the tennis, the object of practice is learning to live an ethical life. During practice, I mostly find myself hitting balls back and forth, becoming so accustomed to the motions and body rhythms that no thinking is necessary. Every so often, the coach observes my progress and exhorts me to use more energy, to use my whole body, to stop over-thinking. The coach frequently finds me standing idly by as the balls fly past me, lost in some daydream, and reminds me to stop thinking about tennis and go back to practicing tennis.
The analog to playing tennis in the kind of spiritual training I have received is meditation, and the analog to hitting balls back and forth is concentrating on a focus area, such as the breath. It turns out that every aspect of living an ethical life — honesty, vigor, renunciation, equanimity, friendship — can be practiced within the titrated container of silent meditation, just as every aspect of a full tennis match can be practiced within the titrated container of a tennis practice rig.
Work on existential risk tends to be quite conceptual. This is fine and good — the conceptual mind has an important role to play — but it is of great benefit to pair this conceptual mode with a titrated practice of actually living an ethical life. How does one meet each new challenge with vigor and determination? Not just by understanding the overwhelming importance of one’s work (though this is important too), but also by having practiced bringing forth vigor and determination to such an extent that it happens as thoughtlessly as a tennis player snapping their tennis racket around to hit a stray ball. How does one consistently take actions that are of benefit to all rather than just oneself? Not just by understanding the ethical arguments for altruism (though this is important too), but also by having practiced renunciation of selfish desires to such an extent that renunciation simply happens as effortlessly as a tennis player moving back to the center of the court after having returned a ball. Spirituality is the place where the knowledge of how to practice these qualities exists..
Many individuals in the existential risk community are in fact highly practiced in the art of living ethical lives. Yet the community does not have a good understanding of how to develop these skills from scratch. Some individuals are lucky enough to develop these qualities during their formative years and are able to thrive in the community. Others do not. Discussion in the community focusses very much on the conceptual layers of living an ethical life (which are important layers!), yet there is not much advice available to newcomers on how exactly to give up self-centered desires, how exactly to maintain focus on an as-yet-unverbalized question, how exactly to face the possibility of great catastrophes while continuing to move forward energetically, how exactly to stay in touch with a deep and heartfelt calling to help the world. It is in this area — providing practical training to reduce the living of an ethical life to muscle memory — that the existential risk community should seek out the help of spiritual traditions.
