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The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation. It is not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up in your life.
They treat your consciousness as an end in itself.
Ultimately, the most meaningful freedom in your life comes from your commitments, the things in life for which you have chosen to sacrifice.
In the last ten years, there has been a trend toward “life hacking.” People want to learn a language in a month, to visit fifteen countries in a month, to become a champion martial artist in a week, and they come up with all sorts of “hacks” to do it. You see it all the time on YouTube and social media these days: people undertaking ridiculous challenges just to show it can be done. This “hacking” of life, though, simply amounts to trying to reap the rewards of commitment without actually making a commitment. It’s another sad form of fake freedom. It’s empty calories for the soul.
Pleasure is beside the point—their lack of pleasure is a mere side effect of their real oppression: their enforced pain.21
But people forget that these rights are also earned through sacrifice against some internal force. Democracy can exist only when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own, when you’re willing to give up some things you might want for the sake of a safe and healthy community, when you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your way. Put another way: democracy requires a citizenry of strong maturity and character.
Freedom itself demands discomfort.
Churchill famously once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others.”
there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe.
News flash: AI is coming. And while chess and Shogi are one thing, as soon as we take AI out of the board games and start putting it in the board rooms . . . well, you and I and everyone else will probably find ourselves out of a job.7
Because here is where the bananas will really hit the fan: the day an AI can write AI software better than we can.
