https://vegasharmon.com/authors/ginerva-davis/ Recent content in Ginerva Davis on Vegas Harmon Hugo en Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/depth-first-breadth-later/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/depth-first-breadth-later/ The great wisdom of his career, as Glimm likes to tell it, is depth first, then breadth. Do not waste time on a million directions at once—do one thing well, and then master another. Over time, you can have deep knowledge across a wide range of subjects. He is unusual, even among elite mathematicians, in that his research actually spans multiple academic disciplines. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/evolution-s-purpose-humanity-as-superintelligence-s-birth-canal/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/evolution-s-purpose-humanity-as-superintelligence-s-birth-canal/ However, somewhat surprisingly, “creating digital superintelligence” has all of the features of a “real” meaning of life, with no supernatural elements needed to square the circle. In the most minimal sense, the “need” for evolution to create digital intelligence explains why humans are here at all, in the particular form that we are, and what we are “made to do” with our time on Earth. And the expected outcome of creating digital superintelligence is certainly cosmic-scale; even the AI “doomers” — people who believe that creating superintelligent AI will likely result in human extinction — think that our AIs will fulfill the long-term science fiction goal of “colonizing the universe,” and fill the cosmos with something. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/extropian-dreams-paperclip-nightmares/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/extropian-dreams-paperclip-nightmares/ In the early days of Silicon Valley, it was actually quite common (at least among far-thinking futurist types who populated the Bay Area) to believe that the coming Singularity would be the single greatest event in the history of the universe, the culmination of the techno-capitalist project that has already done so much good for humanity. In the 1980s and 1990s, the “extropian” community in the Bay Area (a futurist collective committed to fighting entropy and death, which organized around local meetups, an academic institute and a popular mailing list) eagerly awaited the Singularity, believing that a glorious transhuman future — free from all death, suffering, and scarcity — awaited them on the other side. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanity-as-bootloader-searching-for-meaning-we-may-never-grasp/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanity-as-bootloader-searching-for-meaning-we-may-never-grasp/ It is possible that there is no “meaning of life,” no ultimate “point,” in which case, we did no harm by trying to find one. It is possible that the “meaning of life” is in fact something very simple: like “love,” or “beauty,” or “joy” — in which case, this will have been a long journey to “know a place for the very first time,” and we will have to trust our AIs to realize some aspect of the meaningfulness of human life more fully. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/purpose-without-a-designer-why-building-superintelligence-is-our-meaning/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/purpose-without-a-designer-why-building-superintelligence-is-our-meaning/ However, there is also another, more functional sense of a “meaning of life,” one that preserves the clarity and singularity of the original question, but does not require life to have a creator in order for the question to have an answer. We can think of the “meaning of life” as the “purpose of life”: what life was “made for” and what life “in fact contributes” to our universe. And while the concept of “purpose” has many latent associations with intelligent design, in nature, many things — in fact, pretty much all things — functionally have a “purpose” without having been “designed” by anything at all (except, of course, the ongoing process of natural selection). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-future-s-cities-etched-in-silicon/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-future-s-cities-etched-in-silicon/ We did build the great cities of the future: they are just very, very small. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-great-stagnation-lost-in-bits-abandoned-atoms/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-great-stagnation-lost-in-bits-abandoned-atoms/ It has become quite common to bemoan the fact that our “future” does not look very futuristic. And despite us having been living squarely in “the future” since the year 2000, it is true that people still have (functionally) the same houses, cars, clothing and aging bodies that human beings did a century ago. The investor and futurist Peter Thiel’s diagnosis is that sometime around 1970 (around the same time that the Digital Revolution began) humans simply gave up on building in the physical world: Thiel argues that humanity’s greatest builders got lost in the easy and addictive pull of information (first led by the internet, then apps, and finally social media), and so wasted decades innovating in the ephemeral world of “bits,” instead of building in the much more real and important world of “atoms. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-internet-isn-t-the-sideshow-anymore-it-s-the-main-event/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-internet-isn-t-the-sideshow-anymore-it-s-the-main-event/ Billionaires are Twitter people. Little kids are online. Your grandma is online. The internet is simply more powerful and more arresting than anything that can be arranged in the physical space. What is the alternative? The kids will go to online raves. Eventually, we will stop pretending that the internet is a sideshow and that our real culture, the better culture, is somewhere else.