12 Quotes by Tim Urban

Purpose in general is for me to do something I have fun in doing. I want to be excited to wake up. I want to be excited to do my work. I want to feel like I'm playing when I'm doing my work. I'm very curious so I want to feel like a constant learner. I like having great conversations with interesting people [...]; I love creating; artistically creating; and it allows me to continually stay in excitable mode.

Chasing happiness is an amateur move. Feeling contentment in those times when your choices and your circumstances have combined to pull it off, and knowing you have all that you could ever ask for, is for the wise.

It’s when we feel too good that we run the risk of becoming overconfident, intellectually complacent, and set in our ways. It’s exactly when we think we have life all figured out that we end up losing our way.

...we’re a species that isn’t great at truth. We’re built to believe convenient delusions, not to be accurate.

Atheism isn’t a growth model any more than “I don’t like rollerblading” is a workout strategy.

Gen-Ys are delusional; Most people are not special—otherwise “special” wouldn’t mean anything. Even right now, most of Gen-Ys reading this are thinking, “Good point. But I actually am one of the few special ones”—and this is the problem.

What we do know is that humans’ utter dominance on this Earth suggests a clear rule: with intelligence comes power. Which means an ASI, when we create it, will be the most powerful being in the history of life on Earth, and all living things, including humans, will be entirely at its whim—and this might happen in the next few decades.

As far as we’re concerned, if an ASI comes to being, there is now an omnipotent God on Earth—and the all-important question for us is:Will it be a nice God?

Our human instinct to jump at a simple safeguard: “Aha! We’ll just unplug the ASI,” sounds to the ASI like a spider saying, “Aha! We’ll kill the human by starving him, and we’ll starve him by not giving him a spider web to catch food with!” We’d just find 10,000 other ways to get food—like picking an apple off a tree—that a spider could never conceive of.