While playing around with Stable Diffusion last week I had an epiphany. I realized that while I believe with high probability that the world will be radically different in 15 years, all my investments, living arrangements, and other long term plans implied a belief that the world would be roughly similar to now. This shook me to my core.
More concretely, I have investments in suburban American property, a 401k plan that I maximize and invest in a broadly diversified low cost fund, many children whom I educate in roughly conventional subjects (from college age down to toddler age), and a job that I intend to keep for the long term. But I believe there is a less than 1% probability that my 401k will mean anything by the time I can withdraw it. I don't believe that my property (or any suburban American property) will be valuable in 15 years under most scenarios I consider likely. I don't think my children's education will serve them particularly well during their adulthood.
What are my beliefs about the future? I believe that AI and biology at least (two subjects I know well and follow closely) are accelerating quickly, with logarithmic increases of capability and similar log decreases of cost. I believe that it is early days for both fields, and these log curves will be extended further for years to come.
Given those beliefs, the thing I expect most is radical change, in a direction that I can't predict well. I'm not biased towards a doom scenario (AI takeover, engineered unstoppable plague), nor towards a utopian scenario (beneficent AGI, biological immortality). But I am biased strongly away from the continuation of the status quo, away from any regime where I can sell my house, live off my 401k, watch my children take jobs that exist today and have their own families.
I suspect others here hold similar beliefs about the future. How are you preparing now? How do you invest, how do you rear your young, what actions do you take that let you sleep well, knowing that whatever tomorrow brings your rationality has armed you in advance?
I am not doing anything different from you, but I don't see any major tactical shifts that make much sense. The problem is that 401k and index funds already are the maximum-uncertain-future choices, for any future where the stock market succeeds as an institution. Residential real estate already is the lowest risk bet for any future where land is assessed according to price rather than according to use.
So mostly what I am trying to do is:
The core of my intuition about this problem: the less certainty there is, the higher the premium on options. On the other hand, the only real options are the ones we can actually execute. This causes me to believe that the best investments have more to do with skills and knowledge - particularly of coherent approaches to problems that you expect to crop up, or at least where to find out about them. This is to save time and resources spent on search when the circumstances change.
There is an entirely different approach which I probably invest more thinking in, though less money and physical effort (so far): opportunities to make a contribution. By this I mean pro-social business ideas. The most recent example was following the supply chain crunch, and after reading A Brief Introduction to Container Logistics and I considered a business which went around buying up these containers and leases from the various participants in the name of being able to agree to both sides of the impasse described in the article. Still might if we hit another major crunch.