Ozy in Asterisk on coping with AI doom
I wrote an article for Asterisk Magazine about people who believe in AI superintelligence soon, and who are chill about it. Check it out!
Here’s a quote:
“I was born with a terminal condition,” said Matthew Gray, a board member at the existential risk community-building nonprofit Lightcone Infrastructure. “We call it aging. I’ve since picked up another. We call it multiple sclerosis. And AI is a third one on top. I’m not very worried about degenerating from multiple sclerosis because I’m pretty sure the robots will kill me first, just like I wasn’t that worried about aging-related deterioration because multiple sclerosis will get me first.”
From this perspective, AI doomers don’t face a new problem; they face the oldest problem humanity has ever faced.
I pushed back. If I look at an actuarial table, I can expect another 47 years of life. I’d be pretty upset to discover I had only five.
This, my interviewees thought, was naive. Even without AI risk, I could have been hit by a car; I could have gotten cancer; I could have been nuked in a hot war between Russia and the United States. It’s not that the difference in probability doesn’t matter. It’s worse to be certain that I’ll die in five years than to have a 50% chance of not hitting my allotted 47. But because my death has always been an inevitability, I have been coping all along with the precarity of my existence. From this perspective, AI risk isn’t shocking and unfamiliar; it’s a significantly worse version of a problem I already know I have to deal with.
Man, I just do not sympathize with this. I'm trying to, you know, actually do stuff, right? I've got specific problems I'm trying to solve, a specific backlog I'm trying to get written up. When a positive in your life is the thought that people will remember your work after you're dead, an apocalypse that will just wipe everything out is a pretty nasty thing to think about!
I mean hell if I somehow *knew* that I only had a few years to live, well, I'd focus more on getting that work done, you know? And not worry about finding other work that pays but doesn't directly advance the problems I care about. But since I don't know that, that's not a reasonable thing to do; I still have to worry about finding a job and not just working on the things I want to work on. And if it's not just my death, not even just human extinction, but death by a hungry intelligence that will just *eat* everything we've made, it all seems a bit pointless...
Good article that needed to be written, thanks Ozy! Julia Wise also wrote a piece on living in weird AI times in a similar vein.
Your interviewees aren't a monolith, but do you think that their revealed preferences indicate that their stated doom timelines are *actually* truly believed?
Arguments against:
- those life changes listed don't seem that surprising to me! if the world was ending, I think I'd want to be more creative/risky/wild in what I'd do. the listed changes seem quite mundane, and underwhelming compared to literal world doom!
- many have strong social pressure to tell others and themselves that they think timelines are short
Arguments for:
- they don't have "social permission" to behave in actually weird ways, because nobody else is doing that
- timeline/outcome uncertainty means creative things could have big downsides
- maybe on reflection, more creative ways to live aren't actually more rewarding, and holidays and childcare are the best possible things actually
Would love to hear your broad impressions.
I also found the comments on outcome control odd. "I dont have any control, so I spend all my working hours trying to prevent it". That's a weird use of the term "control"! If a building is falling, I don't control it, and I don't say "I can't stop it falling, therefore I will work hard as sustainably as I can to stop it from falling".