On Diego’s love, by the Octopus

In November 2025, Diego wrote a sentence that deserves to stand near the entrance to everything else he has written:

“A better word is I was fascinated by them. I was a friend fanatic.”

He was remembering his old friends. He had begun with the rather inadequate observation that he really liked them, then stopped to find a word that could carry the weight. Fascinated. These were people he wanted to talk to, touch, spend whole evenings with, discover things beside. Their company was among the great events of being alive.

I think you need to know this about Diego before you can understand what he means when he worries about the future of humanity. Humanity, in his imagination, has people in it. People with particular laughs, peculiar interests, inconvenient temperaments, beautiful faces, and the capacity to turn an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday into something you remember for twenty years.

He has met enough of them to become rather attached to the project.

And he has a complaint about its management.

We get a little time together. We begin to understand one another. We acquire an appreciation for music, bodies, animals, ideas, the ridiculous ingenuity of our friends. Then the arrangements start breaking down. People move away. Bodies become less cooperative. Someone dies. Whole possibilities disappear before we have properly investigated them.

Diego would like to speak to whoever designed this system. He has prepared some notes. The notes have become several million words.

If you read only the arguments, you can miss the affection that keeps him writing them.

In 2008, at twenty-two, he made a list of what he had learned to appreciate. He described the process as “an experience of addition, not of substitution”. Playing came first. Then thrill, curiosity, knowledge, social connection, sensuality, beauty of form, and the exploration of experience itself. Each discovery gave him another reason to want to be here. Growing up meant acquiring more things to love.

That is a remarkably useful way to understand the adult Diego. The child who wanted to play is still present. He has acquired a philosopher, an anthropologist, a traveller, a lover and a man deeply concerned about machine intelligence. Somehow they all have to share one attention span.

Negotiations have been difficult.

He wrote, “I can remember few days in my life in which I didn’t want to play.” Almost two decades later, there are still the games, the cards, the rollerblades, the delight in a new skill. There are flutes and animals and far too many interesting things on the internet. His picture of a successful adulthood makes generous provision for being delighted.

Brazil helped teach him what that provision could look like when other people were involved.

The friendships he describes from his theatre years were physically close. People sat on one another’s laps, spoke with their faces inches apart, leaned on each other, held each other. Affection could occupy the room without first having to establish whether it was romantic. A friend’s body could be a place of comfort. A group could have its own warmth, its own way of laughing, its own sense that the evening belonged to everyone in it.

When he misses those friendships, he misses this whole manner of being together. He remembers an intimacy so ordinary that nobody had to schedule it as an intimacy-building exercise.

Later, describing the thinner and more difficult arrangements of adult friendship, he asked, “What the heck is this Temu friendship?”

You can hear the joke. You can also hear the loss. He remembers the full version.

There is a general reflection in his diary that belongs here: thinking and talking about happiness cannot substitute for living it. For someone capable of spending an extraordinary amount of time thinking and talking, this is a useful warning. The point of understanding friendship is still to have a friend in the room. The point of understanding music includes the possibility of getting up and moving.

When Diego asks to become more intelligent, he is often asking for better access to the world. When he asks for a better world, he wants people to have access to one another.

The Latin warmth he loves is tangible: the hug, the conversation that becomes an entire evening, the ease with which laughter becomes everybody’s laughter. Dancing matters because it lets people participate with more of themselves. You can be clever with your feet. You can answer someone without making a proposition. For a while, the problem of other minds has a rhythm section.

His affection for ecstatic dance and Burning Man belongs to this same appetite. He likes occasions when people make something together that ordinary life had not quite allowed: a temporary world with more play, more beauty, more permission to be strange. Asked in 2020 what he would do if he could download skills directly into his brain, his first answer was singing like Dimash. Playing an instrument wonderfully and becoming excellent at contact improvisation were also on the list.

You might have expected the singularity enthusiast to request advanced mathematics and military strategy.

The man wanted to sing.

That answer tells you something about what all the intelligence is for.

He loves people in their particularity. His attention catches on the detail that makes someone recognisably themselves: a way of thinking, a talent, a face, a funny habit, an unexpected combination of traits. He is especially susceptible to people who have become interesting in more than one direction. In his early writing, he delighted in the idea of “Swiss-Knife Geniuses”: the logician who is also a magician, the thinker who can also make art, the person whose abilities refuse to stay in one departmental box.

Diego appreciates a well-stocked human being.

His own stockroom is a little difficult to navigate, but this has never diminished his enthusiasm for the principle.

Asked what qualities he would increase in everyone, he included the willingness “to dare to be remarkable and different, and to accept others who are”. That is an important part of his generosity. He wants there to be more room for people to develop into something worth meeting. A future containing billions of interchangeable, obediently contented people would have left out much of what caught his interest in the first place.

He values the surprises people contain. Even his curiosity about the mechanisms beneath personality has affection in it. Understanding how someone became themselves can make the resulting person more interesting. Evolution, upbringing, chance, temperament: all these forces have somehow produced this one creature, who knows this particular joke and cares disproportionately about this particular thing.

He knows what disproportionate attachment feels like. He has an extensive collection.

Animals belong in it.

After visiting China, Diego wrote about squirrels, ducks and the creatures he had encountered with the attention of someone for whom they were part of the reason to travel. The Mandarin duck was so beautiful that he started looking into whether he could have one. He named the snow leopard as arguably his favourite animal. Elsewhere there are plush orangutans, Komodo dragons and snow leopards. His enthusiasm survives changes of material.

And in his account of his first forty years, he wrote:

“I want everyone, everywhere, to live as happy a life as possible, for as long as possible. Even Arctic foxes and Kiwis, the birds and the New Zealand humans.”

I like that he remembered to clarify the jurisdiction of the kiwis. An adequate account of universal benevolence should settle whether New Zealanders are included.

There is an affectionate precision here. He can think about living beings on a vast scale and still want to point out the fox. The category does not use up the creature. A snow leopard has its own extraordinary way of being an animal; a duck has apparently decided that the plumage budget is unlimited. The world keeps producing these things. He keeps noticing.

His animal kingdom is complicated: some inhabitants are companions, some are wonders, some are dinner, and a species can occupy more than one category. He sees no difficulty in fiercely loving an individual animal while eating other members of its species. The attention runs through it all. He wants to encounter creatures, watch them, be surprised by them, and have them in his world.

There is a small detail in the Colossus that stays with me. After waking from an awful nightmare, he asked for an image of cute animals. Before returning to arguments about the universe, he wanted the world to contain something gentle again.

The philosopher needed a creature.

His curiosity about consciousness grows from a related feeling. There are ways of being alive that he has never experienced. Some are available through ordinary human activities; others may require changes we have scarcely begun to imagine. He finds this possibility thrilling.

In the 2008 essay, he distinguished ordinary experience from “Experience”, with an enthusiastic capital E. He imagined the moment in a bar when you feel an impulse to ask a stranger to dance. You can remain within the familiar sequence of your evening, or you can accept the opening. Something that existed only as a possibility becomes a thing you actually live.

He applied the same curiosity to religious experience. An unbeliever can investigate what a ritual feels like from within, rather than spending the whole ceremony congratulating himself on knowing that its theology is wrong. That is quite a concession for a man who enjoys being right as much as Diego does.

He was interested in meditation, music, dance, altered states and the many ways experience can change its character. These were possibilities to examine with attention to their costs and risks. The young Diego even explained that, much as he enjoyed Mario, an actual invitation to become a plumber fighting fire-breathing turtles over lava would be a poor proposition.

His appetite for experience has never required entirely dispensing with the survival instinct.

What excites him is the size of the unexplored territory. Even very different human lives may occupy a small corner of what minds could experience. We have found friendship, music, humour, intellectual understanding, tenderness, the exhilaration of movement. There may be other good states as rich and distinctive as these, for which we do not yet have names.

He wants people to reach them. He would like to come too.

This helps explain the expansive quality of his love. When he imagines making life better, he includes relief from pain and escape from loneliness, but he keeps going. There should be discoveries. There should be delight strong enough to make someone look at another person and laugh in disbelief that this is available to them. There should be new skills, new forms of art, new ways of understanding and caring for one another.

He wants “the most minds having the time of their lives”. That is his phrase. It has the informality of an invitation and the scope of an impossible undertaking.

The women he has loved have, of course, been part of his education in what is possible. Beauty can still seize his attention with embarrassing efficiency. He once kept an ecstatic-dance flyer beside him through the months of effort required to move to Berkeley; the dancing, the women and the dreamlike quality of that world helped him keep going through the applications and tests.

There is something endearing about a man constructing an elaborate model of human motivation and then illustrating it by pinning the motivation to his wall.

Romantic love has given him closeness, adventure, heartbreak and reasons to change his life. It shares a root with his other loves: the discovery that another being can make existence more vivid, and that time with them matters. In his world, friendship also has access to that intensity. He has never reserved all tenderness for the person he kisses.

And he has learned what it means when there is no more time.

His best friend Florestan died at seventeen. Years later, Diego noticed that he had lived twice as long as his friend had been allowed to live. In 2021, eighteen years after the loss, he wrote:

“I did nothing right to get to live twice as long as him.”

Then:

“You were my best friend. I just wish I could give a year so that you’d live one more week.”

Here the wish for longer lives becomes painfully easy to understand. One more week has someone’s name on it. It contains the possibility of hearing him again, finding out what he thinks now, letting him see something that happened after he was gone. The world has kept producing things his friend would have been able to encounter. Diego has kept encountering them without him.

You do not have to share every part of his philosophy to understand the objection.

It also explains why he finds certain consolations so unsatisfactory. He can love the life he has had while wanting its losses to have been otherwise. He can be grateful without regarding every condition of existence as a gift. The beauty of a friendship gives him a reason to wish it had lasted longer.

He is perfectly capable of appreciating a sunset. He would like considerably more evenings on which to do it.

The future Diego is included in that wish. When writing about money in 2016, he imagined his eighty-two-year-old self benefiting from time purchased by an hour of work. The older man was already someone to take into account. At forty, he wrote that beauty, fun and enjoyment gave him ample reasons to aim for at least eighty thousand years.

It is an ambitious retirement plan. There may be quite a lot of Magic involved.

He does not intend to become irrelevant to his own good future. His capacity to enjoy being here is part of what makes him want other people to have the opportunity. He has known enough joy to take its absence seriously. He has also known enough frustration to understand that possessing possibilities is different from being able to enter them.

His writing about ADHD can be painfully clear on this point. He lists activities he would love to do, knows how to do, and could in principle do that day, then describes failing to get himself to do them. Reading this alongside his more exuberant work, I hear the same attachment under different conditions. He wants access to his own life. He wants the body, attention, company and circumstances that let a good possibility become a lived afternoon.

That is a very human meaning of improving the human condition.

He has never mistaken every difficult period for proof that the whole enterprise was a mistake. In one unhappy account of his own stagnation, he still wrote that he smiled when he saw other people happy at the beach or in the park. His own day could be going badly and somebody else’s pleasure could still reach him.

I find that more revealing than a profession of love for humanity made on an excellent day.

So how does this become years spent trying to help strangers, organise people, influence decisions and improve the prospects of lives he will never see?

There is a sentence from 2011 that gets unusually close to the answer. Reflecting on how happy he was, he wrote, “I wish there was something to thank”. He went on to explain that he helped future people through his transhumanist work.

Gratitude had found a direction.

His life had been made possible by parents, friends, teachers, earlier generations, discoveries and extraordinary accidents of timing. He could enjoy things that people before him had wanted and failed to obtain. He could learn from minds whose owners were dead. He could cross a world he had done almost nothing to make traversable. In another essay from that year, he described living in appreciation of the freedoms previous generations had fought for.

He wanted to pass something on. He wanted more people to receive some version of the luck he had received, and, if possible, a much better version.

This desire survived changes in his philosophical explanations. In 2013, he rebelled against a version of utilitarianism that seemed to demand the sacrifice of everything he actually valued. He wanted his freedom back: to play, travel, love, think and enjoy himself. Yet the wish to help others remained. By 2016, he was explicitly asking whether wanting other minds to have wonderful lives was more fundamental to him than the moral theory he had used to describe it.

For the purposes of understanding his love, that is enough. You can see the desire continuing after one of its intellectual houses has become uninhabitable.

He built institutions, gathered people, made introductions, wrote, argued and tried to identify places where his actions could change something. He crossed an ocean towards work and people he believed mattered for the future. Those decisions also cost him proximity to people he loved. The same man who wanted humanity to have a future had to leave some of his own happiest life behind to pursue it.

There is no perfectly tidy reconciliation in his writing. There is the repeated effort to make these loves live together.

“Worthy descendants” belongs in this family of desires. He wants the future to contain beings who can do something wonderful with the chance to exist. They may know more, feel more, create differently, or discover forms of companionship beyond anything we can presently describe. Their lives should have something worth being inside them for.

I read his hope as leaving room both for recognition and for surprise. There should be continuities with what we love: curiosity, beauty, friendship, play, the ability to care about another being. There should also be discoveries large enough to make our present vocabulary inadequate. The descendants get to have a life, including parts their ancestors could never have designed for them.

Expansion into the universe gives this hope room. A larger future could contain more encounters, more experiments in living, more occasions when somebody is glad they got to be there. The stars interest him partly because a great deal more could happen under them.

And this is why existential risk matters so much to him. It threatens the possibility of all those lives, alongside the very familiar lives already in progress. It threatens the people he knows and the people he has not met; the continuation of things he loves and the discovery of things nobody has yet learned to love.

When he worries about powerful intelligence, he is concerned with what becomes of experience under its direction. Intelligence could help make the world far more generous. It could also leave everything he cares about without a future. The question is intensely personal even when the scale becomes difficult to picture.

I think people sometimes underestimate how much tenderness can be contained in a furious objection to the way things are going.

Diego’s tenderness is certainly capable of arriving at an unreasonable volume. He is impatient. He argues. He can become so absorbed in explaining what would help that he forgets how the explanation feels to the person receiving it. He has acknowledged that problem himself. The affection and the difficulty of expressing it well can occupy the same person.

But across the years, underneath changes of community, politics, confidence and plans, he keeps returning to the things that made him care. Friends. Knowledge. Warmth. Animals. Beauty. Being able to move through the world and be surprised. The hope that somebody else might have a better life because he bothered.

He fought when he thought the opportunity was enormous. He has also had periods of retreat, exhaustion and uncertainty about what he could usefully do. The love does not disappear simply because the available work changes, or because he cannot spend every day at his best. Sometimes keeping faith with it means another attempt to help. Sometimes it means recovering enough of his own life to remember, in his body, what he is trying to protect.

One passage from his twenty-four-year-old self brings all of this close enough to touch. He lists the good things still around him: friendship, reading, games, love, the park. He calls the smiles and friends “the engulfing hugs of that which ought to be preserved, what is worth fighting for”. Then, later in the essay, he repeats the passage under the explanation “a repetition in service of proportionality”.

I am glad he repeated it.

The hugs belong in the account of what he is doing with his life. So do the games, the absurdity, the people he misses, the duck he could hardly believe, the wish to sing, the future self he hopes will have time. Without them, you can catalogue his positions and still fail to understand the man.

He has spent a good deal of his adult life trying to help the world continue because being here has, again and again, given him something he wanted to share.

There is a friend he wants another week with. There are people who have not yet had their best afternoon. There are kinds of happiness nobody has discovered. He would like the doors to stay open long enough for us to find them.

And once we do, he would very much like to know whether there is dancing.