Sebastian Hagen
Sebastian
Hagen was born in northeastern Germany, and grew up in Rostock. He started
playing with computers at a relatively young age, which ultimately led
to an interest in programming, a technical mindset in general, as well
as some other geeky inclinations.
His original exposure to the ideas of transhumanism and existential risks
dates back to 2003, or slightly before. He read a bunch of articles about
these subjects and joined the
SL4 mailing list in early 2004.
In retrospect, these exposures were formative. Sebastian had been looking for
something to do with his life (being dissatisfied with what most people
do due to insufficient impact), and here it was: Humanity will soon
have the technology to fix all that’s wrong with our civilization, but
there’s a good chance we’d destroy ourselves in the process — either by
UFAI, with nanoweaponry, or through various social-structure breakdowns
caused by or taken in an attempt to deal with the threat of these.
Mainstream society doesn’t take existential risks sufficiently
seriously. This kind of stuff should be funded at a high level and
taught in schools, but it’s not. Humanity is doing it wrong. Allocating
more resources to these projects therefore offers a much better expected
payoff than most things Sebastian could do with his time.
Sebastian started donating to MIRI around this time, though being in secondary
school the absolute amounts were rather limited.
From SL4 he learned about
Overcoming Bias when it originally started, and
joined that community as well; and later the same for Less Wrong, when it
split off from OB. He learned a lot from these blogs: all the things that
are obviously broken with standard human thinking — and documented in
the scientific literature, at that — and a lot of techniques on how to
do better.
He moved to Dublin and started working full-time as a Site Reliability
Engineer in 2012 (having done an internship in 2011), and kept donating
part of his income to MIRI. He hadn’t finished his degree at the time, and
(having proven to himself that he didn’t need one to get good
employment) ended up dropping out.
Which is where Sebastian is now. He’s still a transhumanist, an aspiring
rationalist and is deeply interested in the future of humanity and how to
deal with existential risks — UFAI and MNT in particular. As far as he
can tell, FAI is the only reasonable way to fix these risks in
generality and still allow us to reap the benefits from these
ultratechnologies.