Turning 20 while the world turns upside-down | Parv Mahajan

I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, lots of jobs will be gone soon. Probably, the smartest thing alive will no longer be human. Probably, things will change very quickly. Maybe, one of those things is whether or not we’re still here. This moment seems very fragile, and perhaps more than most moments will never happen again. I want to capture a little bit of what it feels like to be alive right now. * * * Everywhere around me there is this incredible sense of freefall and of grasping. I realize with excitement and horror that over a semester Claude went from not understanding my homework to easily solving it, and I recognize this is the most normal things will ever be. Suddenly, the ceiling for what is possible seems so high - my classmates join startups, accelerate their degrees; I find myself building bespoke bioinformatics tools in minutes, running monthlong projects in days. I write dozens of emails and thousands of lines of code a week, and for the fir

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• Yixiong Hao
• Will Anderson