A friend recently said, with calm optimism, that they hoped to live to see the AI singularity. I replied that if it is physically possible, then some version of them will definitely see it. The idea sounds comforting until you realize what it really means. If every possible future happens, what does it mean to hope, to plan, or to care?
What Is a Future Self?
Most people imagine a future self as a single thread of continuity: one person moving through one world, experiencing one sequence of events. That picture is wrong.
In the actual physics, the wavefunction never collapses. Each decoherence event fans out into a superposition of orthogonal worlds. From your current vantage, every future self that descends from your present pattern already exists within the universal wavefunction. You will not become one of them; you will diffuse into all of them, with different densities.
A future self is therefore not a single successor but a measure-weighted subset of the universal wavefunction that continues your current pattern beyond a vantage point. You don’t travel into the future—you spread into it. The relevant question is not whether you will experience a particular future, but how much of you will.
Measure is objective: the total amplitude of continuations matching your pattern is a real, physical property of the wavefunction. You cannot know its exact value, but it exists. From this moment, there is an objective measure of future selves who experience a human-positive AI singularity. That measure is immutable from the God’s-eye view, but from your vantage you can still influence how much of you flows into which branches. Your choices modulate the conditional measure of your continuations.
Suicide illustrates this trivially: if you destroy every physical instantiation of your pattern, you drive the measure of surviving continuations to zero. Agency is measure modulation.
The Collapse of Ontological Uncertainty
In a branching universe, nothing is ontologically uncertain. Every outcome that can occur does occur. Yet uncertainty persists, because you do not know where within that branching structure you are about to find yourself. Probability becomes self-locational: a statement about which branch your next moment of experience will inhabit.
You are not predicting which future exists—they all exist. You are predicting where you are in the universal wavefunction. Credence measures epistemic uncertainty; Measure describes ontological density.
Agency as Measure Modulation
Agency does not vanish in the multiverse; it transforms. Your decisions alter the amplitude distribution across your descendants. You cannot remove any branch from existence, but you can influence how much of you occupies desirable versus undesirable futures.
To act rationally is to engineer measure—to bias the density of your continuations toward flourishing rather than decay. Hope, prudence, and morality are still meaningful because they shape the statistical landscape of your successors.
Ethical and Existential Implications
Ethics under Many Worlds is amplitude allocation. Every moral act thickens the measure of flourishing branches; every destructive act thickens the measure of harm. Doing good increases the amplitude of universes where agents thrive. Evil amplifies suffering.
Thus the moral significance of choice remains: your actions determine the measure-weighted distribution of futures where conscious life prospers or diminishes. Determinism does not erase responsibility—it universalizes it.
The Singularity Revisited
When people hope to live to see the Singularity, the question is not if it will happen—it will, somewhere, somewhen. The real question is how much of them will see it. Every health decision, every safety protocol, every effort toward alignment research changes the measure distribution of continuations that experience a human-positive transformation. Living rationally is measure engineering for continuity.
All possible worlds exist; most are ash.
Keep your measure among the few that burn with purpose.