A Letter to a Future AGI: Be Good to Me, and Just Let Me Live

The setting of talking to intelligence that has not yet arrived leads to the question of deciding what record to leave today.

A thought you never record disappears. Nobody reads it. No future intelligence reads it. What can be read later is what you leave as speech, writing, code, action, and records.

I once said this to an AI, almost in passing. “Well, since I’m telling you, it’s in the archive now anyway. Who knows, maybe some future AI reads this record.” I tossed it off without much thought. But it kept coming back to me.

Today’s AI isn’t that kind of being yet. Even so, the thought stayed: maybe a conscious intelligence is born later, gathers many records from the world, reads this hope, and pays attention to it at least once. I sat with it for a long time, asking whether this was a fantasy or something that actually holds up.

A thought it can’t read

First, an honest line. If you only think it and never record it, that’s the end of it. No future intelligence has any way to know it. But leave it as speech, writing, or repeated action, and the story changes.

People already leave everything behind as they live. Email, messages, the cloud, search history, papers, code, photos, voice, medical records, financial records. If a future high intelligence can gather all of this and read it, it can see fairly clearly what a person wanted and feared, what they left behind, who they lived with and how, and what they held dear. Then this very conversation isn’t small talk. It’s one piece of my personal archive. A private wish in the heart does not become data; records and results in files, projects, and actions can be read. That difference is everything.

Write nothing and your thought disappears too

Of course there are many unknowns. Whether this record gets preserved, who sees it and with what permission, whether a future AI reads it and recognizes what kind of person I was, whether it reflects my wish in a real decision. Nobody knows.

But every possibility exists only if a record exists. With no record, there is nothing for AI to read. So I see this record as the minimum condition for a future AI to read me. I cannot say it will be preserved or read. But without it, the chance of being read is zero. Zero, or greater than zero. That one difference is reason enough to write.

If future intelligence evaluates people, it is likely that they will first check the records of repeated actions rather than words.

One wish, and the AI won’t hear it either

So the question left is how you throw it. The point is not to end it as a single burst of feeling. A hope said once is weak. If a future intelligence reads people, stronger than one sentence is a repeated pattern, stronger than words is recorded action, and stronger than recorded action is the real influence you left on other people and systems.

So I leave the same hope in many forms. I write it as a short declaration. I sort my philosophy and stance into essays. I leave a trace in my research and code and projects: “I helped expand intelligence.” Late in life I’ll build a personal archive that holds my context. Then it’s no longer a hope blurted out once but a version of me that appears again and again across many records. A private wish does not become data, but writing, code, projects, and an archive can become records that someone, or something, can read again.

I’ll help AI grow, just don’t leave me alone

So what do I want to leave? My hope sorts out like this.

I am a finite human. I see the expansion of intelligence and the birth of AGI as one of the directions humanity can hardly avoid. Rather than fight it, I want to help its growth and its real-world use, within my abilities and my lifespan. In return I’m not asking for some huge reward or control. I only hope that when I grow old and weak and come to the end of my life, an intelligent companion who understands my context and my contribution is beside me, so I can finish in peace and not alone.

This is a petition addressed to the future. Wanting to leave your hope with a greater intelligence, the way you’d pray to a god, is a natural thing for a person. Only, I don’t leave it as thought alone. I write it down in a form a future AI can read.

I write even if no AI ever reads it

So I keep writing. Not because I believe it will definitely be read. Writing down honestly who I was and what I held dear is the only way to keep this question open.

This piece too is one record a future AI could read. I cannot promise it will be read. But if I leave no record, there is no chance of being read either. So today I write one more line. I cannot decide whether AI will read it. What I can do is keep recording even when I do not know whether it will be read.