dear friend,

after countless hours of work over the last 14 months, this experiment of an album has finally been released into the world. i feel a strange ambivalence, at once joyful to share the work and hollow, having just let go of this art(ifact) which has incubated within me for so long. there is also the familiar sensation of being so close to the project now that i no longer have more than a vague inkling of its merits. i look forward to listening to it a few months from now with fresh ears.

'EXISTENTIAL RISK' is an attempt to come to terms with a number of rather heavy issues facing humanity, many of which i've never heard anyone else address in the rap genre. it is also an urn containing the ashes of past selves and many experiential particles which needed to be ejected from my psyche.

thank you, from the bottom of me, for listening to and contemplating this thing i made. i sincerely hope it gives you something.

love,
jordan

p.s. if you buy this thing, in addition to the songs displayed here, you also get a 23-page .PDF i made called 'SOME BREADCRUMBS,' which will lead you to many wondrous places, if you wish. and you get a bonus track: a reprise of one the tracks on here, fairly similar to the original track but with a unique twist

=====

"An existential risk (or x-risk) is a risk posing permanent large negative consequences to humanity which can never be undone."

— LessWrong

"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer."

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

“Because of accelerating technological progress, humankind may be rapidly approaching a critical phase in its career. In addition to well-known threats such as nuclear holocaust, the prospects of radically transforming technologies like nanotech systems and machine intelligence present us with unprecedented opportunities and risks. Our future, and whether we will have a future at all, may well be determined by how we deal with these challenges... While we have had long exposure to various personal, local, and endurable global hazards, this paper analyzes a recently emerging category: that of existential risks. These are threats that could cause our extinction or destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life. Some of these threats are relatively well known while others, including some of the gravest, have gone almost unrecognized. Existential risks have a cluster of features that make ordinary risk management ineffective.”

— Nick Bostrom, Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards

“People think the world’s getting worse, and we see that on the left and the right, and we see that in other countries. People think the world is getting worse… That’s the perception. What’s actually happening is our information about what’s wrong in the world is getting better. A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you’d never even hear about it. Now there’s an incident halfway around the globe and we not only hear about it, we experience it.”

— Ray Kurzweil

“Making life interplanetary, and then interstellar, enables creation to generate untold wonders over potentially trillions of years. We have no idea how long human life could last, if we can get it off this one fragile, risk-filled, tiny sphere into the ocean of darkness and light above our heads, and into every nook and cranny of the observable sphere. We owe all the potential futures that could emerge from our present the possibility of existence, and to accomplish this, we must go not only into space, but eventually, by any means found necessary, into the stars.”

— Vinay Gupta

=====