But sometimes, people participate in discussions or argue about the subject, not because they expect it to make the world any safer, but because it makes them feel a bit less alone.

I am worried that too much time spent in the Fast World will make me less invested in other people. Earnest belief in the coming singularity can make everything land with a little less weight. If the world ends or is otherwise rendered unrecognisable in two years, then the joys, triumphs, setbacks and adversities of my family and friends lose gravitas. Their implications are fewer, and their impact will be brief.

I want to really believe in those futures. I want to delude myself as thoroughly as I can. Because this is how I will feel these moments as they deserve to be felt. I do not want my mind to qualify them with an unspoken countdown.

This attitude can colour the way you perceive the whole world. It can make everyone – teenagers on their way to school, business people on their rush-hour commute, joggers on a morning run – appear to you like swimmers battling hopelessly against a tsunami they cannot see, their labour fruitless, misguided and tragic. It can make you feel sorry for them. This is an attitude towards the rest of the world that I want to avoid at all costs. Partly out of humility, since of course, the Situationally Aware could be wrong, which would make this misplaced pity all the more objectionable in retrospect! But even if they’re right, this simply isn’t the way that I want to relate to my fellow human beings. I don’t want to presume that they’d act any differently if they knew what (I think) I know. I don’t want to possess a mindset that robs human endeavour of its purpose.