Advice for a future 18-year old

My friends reached out to my wife and I with this neat idea. Their son, we’ll call him Caleb, because that’s his name, is turning 1-year old soon. Mom and dad are making a compilation of videos from family and friends (ridiculous and selfish that they have friends besides my wife and I) giving advice to the 18-year (do I have to hyphenate that? Can I have multiple sentences inside parenthesis?) version of their son (this is similar to time travel I suppose). I digress. So they’re going to take all these videos and make a montage of sorts and present it to him for his 18th birthday. And as an 18-year old boy, he’s really going to give a shit and take it seriously. So now we’ve covered the foundations. Onward.

I’ve given this an unbelievable amount of (poorly organized) thought. Just lightly obsessing over it in my head in evenings. This exercise is highly relevant to me because I have a 7 month old daughter, we’ll call her Bella, because that’s her name. So, here’s where I’m at. 18 years in the future (I’ve stopped hyphenating ages), 18 years ago (follow me here), wasn’t a huge deal. Big, but not huge. Now however, we are so much closer to AGI (artificial general intelligence) (double parenthesis situation — if you disagree we can talk about that, but be warned, I’m completely unqualified to so much as moderate that discussion), that I don’t know if my advice is going to fall on the def ears of a humanoid-AI symbiote (not sure if that’s a word) that can crush me with his mind and is beyond receiving my driveling “advice.” This also assumes the evolution of a benevolent AI and that we’re cyborgs. If we’re dealing with an AI with a poor attitude, this video will have long ago been devoured by our super-intelligent overloads with the rest of the internet, and our feeble brains… and bodies? I… digress.

So what advice can I give to my dear friend’s cyborg, superhuman son besides being kind to the chimps that created him? I have so much advice to give (because apparently I have a high opinion of my opinions). I think it’s best to choose one thing, to narrow it down, so I’ll focus on this one:

Our lives are a series of stories we generate (often, as time progresses, more than a bit departed from objective reality), that we assign various levels of importance and meaning to. I might be stealing bits and pieces from someone here, perhaps Yuval Noah Harrari, but we humans are storytelling machines. Mom and dad love you, and have loved you, far more than you can begin to contemplate. This stuff is encoded in their genome son (“son” here is spoken like a rapper, and not like a fatherly figure). The love is deep. You’ll have to be a (non-sociopathic) parent to start to get the gist of how much love is unilaterally poured into a child (and reciprocation is fairly limited for quite some time). That’s just to get to the level of dad-love. Mom-love is something I couldn’t even pretend to be able to write about. Now that you’re 18, you’re probably going to have a memory or two of something your dad (or mom) said or did that you interpreted as shitty, or perhaps it was something sound, said in passing, but you assigned enormous meaning to it, and now it sits patiently, in the back of your head, lightly nudging your decision making and maybe even your self-image. Mom and dad are sorry and didn’t mean anything. Is it a little fucked up that you’ve clung so hard to an imperfect moment or two amidst a sea of love and sacrifice? Yea. But it’s normal. And I don’t want to play it down. Whatever it was, really mattered when it happened. But does it anymore? So here’s the takeaway. Mom and dad never meant anything bad, they love you too damn much. Your life (that they generously bestowed upon you) is your interpretation of a series of stories that you’ve pulled from objective reality and molded into your perception of things and that’s cool. That’s all of us. But now you know it. So don’t be mad at mom or dad about something they did or said 15 years ago and don’t get trapped in a story you don’t like. You can re-write any part of it at any time, starting now.

Also, don’t use your superpowers for evil and please fix the computer (or whatever new device we’re struggling to use, we’re sorry we’re annoying but we’re kind of old now).