Ellsberg Skipped His Retirement Plan Because He Expected Nuclear Doomsday
No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner
Reading Daniel Ellsberg's memoir, Jim Nielsen notices that RAND analysts in the missile-gap years sounded a lot like today's AI labs: a brotherhood of insiders carrying the burden of saving the world. Ellsberg and Alain Enthoven, the youngest staffers, never joined RAND's generous retirement plan, convinced they wouldn't live to collect it. Nielsen sees the same faith in AI researchers who smoke because they believe AI will cure cancer first.
Neither of us joined the extremely generous retirement plan RAND offered. Neither of us believed, in our late twenties, we had a chance of collecting on it.