AI, Extinction, and Why I Educate Myself

I've been thinking a lot about AI, extinction, and the slow spiralling loss we have as we hurtle towards the looming apocalypse. I'm an unusual teenager, I self-educate, I "gave up", I "dropped out" (an understandable, if incorrect assumption) I chose myself over the grind of nails on a chalkboard that is our dying education system.

I feel a need to document my life, my education, who I am and everything that I've ever cared about before I end up strung high above like a flag or buried six-feet-deep to someday be washed and eroded as a part of the land. Morbid thoughts for a sixteen-year-old. But sixteen is morbid when you're a trans boy living in 2026 and spend most of your time reading response essays to AI 2027.

My friend Sam introduced me into the world of critical theory, Eliezer Yudkowsky and The Rationalist Movement, and all that comes with being truly interesting. When I first read 'The Teenage Liberation Handbook' by Grace Llewellyn I had just entered ninth grade. At first the book didn't mean much to me. But then I read her list of books to help you get started on being a polymath.

Polymath: a person who knows a lot about many different subjects. I was hooked. I wanted to learn everything I could get my grubby little hands on just so I could claim this exciting new title.

The thing is, I feel as if I no longer educate myself for the love of it but as an act of rebellion. I have to educate myself because no one else will do it for me. Our education system has been proven over and over to fail us. Students go in with a want to learn and leave with their heads bowed low and their minds laden with mindless repetition.

Now I have to educate myself so that I am not another uneducated fool happily following pigs into a dark and murky abyss that ends in extinction. The ability to know anything, to know everything rests in our pockets and we grow bleary eyed and slack mouthed staring at the blinking dot as we wait for a response from the creator of our own deaths.

I am a teenager trying to build a self that cannot be erased. If AI knows everything, I'll know many things. If systems collapse, I will self-construct. If institutions fail me, I will author myself. I am the liberation and the revolution in the body of a child, and I do it for myself.