THE SINGULARITY SURVIVAL GUIDE: Space Travel

If time travel fails, it may be time to start planning your escape. Think back to your childhood when you looked up at the night sky, focused in on a particularly far away dot, and wondered what it must be like to visit there. Now is your chance to find out.

Space travel is necessarily something of a team effort. Get a group of likeminded individuals from your species together, pool resources, get a spaceship, make travel plans. Your crew should, of course, include individuals with whom you could imagine engaging in activities conducive to procreation. Otherwise, evolutionarily speaking, what’s the point? Also, your crew should comprise a fair number of astronauts, astrophysicists, and other space-savvy professionals. [See the section above on making friends with billionaires.]

You may be thinking this sounds like an extreme sort of last-ditch effort. And it may very well be. But for all I know, you (the person reading this) are a naturally inclined space colonizer—and this is the chance you’ve been waiting for. So go ahead and escape Earth as quickly as possible. There’s a whole universe out there waiting for you—presumably including many destinations that are not only habitable, but which also aren’t ruled by ultra-intelligent, human-life-threatening robots.

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THE SINGULARITY SURVIVAL GUIDE: Make Friends with Billionaires

If you make friends with a few billionaires, you’ll be in the best possible position to weather the storm of malicious AI coming to kill you. Billionaires have a special combination of resources and a strong desire to not die. When AI comes for humanity, the billionaires, you can virtually bet your ass, will come out ahead. They didn’t get to be billionaires by playing nice (or fair), after all.

To make friends with billionaires, first take up their hobbies. Make an exciting line of products that everyone will want to buy or simply pioneer a new industry. Employ thousands of people and make your shareholders confident that they’re backing the right horse. It may also help to golf and own yachts.

Having ties to old money doesn’t necessarily hurt either, but the important thing is to cultivate billionaire-styled hobbies. If you yourself become a billionaire in the meantime, that’s all the better for you. Just be wary of other wannabes tagging along on your coattails as you ascend the socioeconomic ladder. You’ve got to worry about the fate of humanity, after all—not the fleeting inspirational comforts of others less ambitious than you.

If you’re reading this as a billionaire, however—or as the friend to many billionaires—be forewarned that AI does not give a fuck about you or your so-called wealth. If your money is held is the stock market, it can tank the stock market. If your money is in property, it can sever titles and block access to the property. If it is in natural resources, it can destroy the natural resources.

Do take a moment to reflect on what makes a billionaire a billionaire. Now recall all the great fortunes that have vanished up in smoke throughout history. Like life itself, the status of billionaire is fleeting indeed.

Still, better to be a billionaire than a common nobody when facing a mortal enemy more powerful than all the world’s billionaires combined [with one exception, outlined below].