Thinking "I will probably die in n years" feels extremely different from thinking "everyone will probably die in n years."
Wouldn't you give your life to save the world? Journey to Mount Doom to pitch the ring, fly the nuke into the sun, whatever?
People for a very long time have been willing to die to save the people, the culture, the possibilities they love.
Even not believing in an afterlife for me personally, and not feeling woo ideas like being one with the universe, I would derive a lot of comfort when I die from knowing that good things that I love will persist past my lifetime.
The extinction of humanity and maybe all life is so much worse than the extinction of me as an individual.
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".
It's possible to believe in a very high probability of doom—say, in a minimum of a 30% chance of human extinction within a maximum of 20 years. This would be an abnormally strong belief in imminent human extinction by most standards.
But what do you do with it? You have up to a 70% chance of seeing retirement. You might need to eat and provide yourself with shelter for up to 20 years. If your kids are almost college aged, well, they could do worse than spend 4 years hanging out with people their own age and learning interesting things.
A lot of this comes down to what I think of as the Hamilton principle: "Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder." Specifically, it takes no particular preparation to be killed by a T-800 (or by a hypnodrone, for those who prefer more recent classics). So you might as well prepare for the worlds where you do survive, because those are the worlds where your decisions make a difference.
I do, however, recommend enjoying your life and hugging your children. As noted in Ozy's article, we're all under a sentence of death anyways. And so why not enjoy life?
I have a 97% chance of doom in the next five years, and mostly it doesn't lead to me doing things, it leads to me panicking a lot and doing nothing. I've started taking more opportunities to do things that I specifically want to check off my bucket list, but I'm not a very adventurous person by nature.
From browsing your blog, you seem like a big nerd. If you're single, work out and try to get laid, you will be in better shape than all the other nerds and will probably have a good time before the robots get you. You write a lot, see if you can learn to do poetry or some other form of creative expression. (If you're gay, get on PrEP and get on Grindr and find another gay nerd, you will have lots of fun fucking and sperging out on history together.)
Don't forget the prenup!
If you're married, spend time with your wife. And kids, if they exist.
Most people cannot "actually" believe the world is ending, the way you imagine. This somehow triggers an association with "my tribe is ending". Most people deny or are ignorant of existential risk, so it's not usable for most situations. This is why the only groups which actually can believe that the world is ending are millenarian cults. However, even when this belief is reached, people usually don't start to live crazy- quite the opposite. How many instances of this can you name from groups which believed the world is about to end? It's generally the opposite. So, there are some people super concerned about the topic, with their independent groups, and I'm not the first one to compare it in structure to a religion, to show these parallels- although I don't think it's actually a "classic" religion, just in the broader meaningful ideology space (and of course, there's no way to cleanly separate religion from it, which is why often freedom of religion, and thought, are two sides of the same coin) So, there you have it. Even they are still not quite on the level of millenarian cult. Yet, the only thing we should predict, on average, if/when they go further along this path, is that they become more insular, and not much other craziness.
Good article! It's not so different from living with a terminal illness, is it? Your life is going to end soon, but you don't know exactly when, so you make the most of the time you have left.
Or perhaps having an aggressive tumor removed...it might return, but then it might not, and you have a whole bunch of uncertainty around how much time you have left.
Many people don't believe that. This article is discussing people who do, but it's about their outlook on life, not trying to convince you they are correct about the robots.
This is mostly a joke, I don't know and have no opinion on whether AI will kill us soon. But to bite the bullet: why? I feel like people do that all the time and it seems fairly effective as a coping mechanism. A kid will die and the religious will talk about God's plan or whatever. Death scares us, so people believe in heaven.
It is an effective coping mechanism, but it's picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. It dramatically reduces your ability to think clearly about changes in your situation that, prior to changing your views, you would have wanted to act on.
In the death case, for instance, cryo looks better than it used to. In other cases: I do wonder how Shmuel in https://putanumonit.com/2016/09/16/plastic-men/ did during covid-19, when a lot of the NY Hasidic community did quite poorly.
Thinking "I will probably die in n years" feels extremely different from thinking "everyone will probably die in n years."
Wouldn't you give your life to save the world? Journey to Mount Doom to pitch the ring, fly the nuke into the sun, whatever?
People for a very long time have been willing to die to save the people, the culture, the possibilities they love.
Even not believing in an afterlife for me personally, and not feeling woo ideas like being one with the universe, I would derive a lot of comfort when I die from knowing that good things that I love will persist past my lifetime.
The extinction of humanity and maybe all life is so much worse than the extinction of me as an individual.
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".
It's possible to believe in a very high probability of doom—say, in a minimum of a 30% chance of human extinction within a maximum of 20 years. This would be an abnormally strong belief in imminent human extinction by most standards.
But what do you do with it? You have up to a 70% chance of seeing retirement. You might need to eat and provide yourself with shelter for up to 20 years. If your kids are almost college aged, well, they could do worse than spend 4 years hanging out with people their own age and learning interesting things.
A lot of this comes down to what I think of as the Hamilton principle: "Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder." Specifically, it takes no particular preparation to be killed by a T-800 (or by a hypnodrone, for those who prefer more recent classics). So you might as well prepare for the worlds where you do survive, because those are the worlds where your decisions make a difference.
I do, however, recommend enjoying your life and hugging your children. As noted in Ozy's article, we're all under a sentence of death anyways. And so why not enjoy life?
I have a 97% chance of doom in the next five years, and mostly it doesn't lead to me doing things, it leads to me panicking a lot and doing nothing. I've started taking more opportunities to do things that I specifically want to check off my bucket list, but I'm not a very adventurous person by nature.
From browsing your blog, you seem like a big nerd. If you're single, work out and try to get laid, you will be in better shape than all the other nerds and will probably have a good time before the robots get you. You write a lot, see if you can learn to do poetry or some other form of creative expression. (If you're gay, get on PrEP and get on Grindr and find another gay nerd, you will have lots of fun fucking and sperging out on history together.)
Don't forget the prenup!
If you're married, spend time with your wife. And kids, if they exist.
I have a hypothesis as to why that is:
Most people cannot "actually" believe the world is ending, the way you imagine. This somehow triggers an association with "my tribe is ending". Most people deny or are ignorant of existential risk, so it's not usable for most situations. This is why the only groups which actually can believe that the world is ending are millenarian cults. However, even when this belief is reached, people usually don't start to live crazy- quite the opposite. How many instances of this can you name from groups which believed the world is about to end? It's generally the opposite. So, there are some people super concerned about the topic, with their independent groups, and I'm not the first one to compare it in structure to a religion, to show these parallels- although I don't think it's actually a "classic" religion, just in the broader meaningful ideology space (and of course, there's no way to cleanly separate religion from it, which is why often freedom of religion, and thought, are two sides of the same coin) So, there you have it. Even they are still not quite on the level of millenarian cult. Yet, the only thing we should predict, on average, if/when they go further along this path, is that they become more insular, and not much other craziness.
So, it's mostly a category of the social permission theory.
Good article! It's not so different from living with a terminal illness, is it? Your life is going to end soon, but you don't know exactly when, so you make the most of the time you have left.
Or perhaps having an aggressive tumor removed...it might return, but then it might not, and you have a whole bunch of uncertainty around how much time you have left.
Why should I believe that "robots will kill me" soon?
Many people don't believe that. This article is discussing people who do, but it's about their outlook on life, not trying to convince you they are correct about the robots.
My solution to not freaking out about humanity's impending doom was becoming an anti-natalist who wants humanity to end
Changing your views on what's good based on what you think is inevitable seems like a poor coping mechanism.
This is mostly a joke, I don't know and have no opinion on whether AI will kill us soon. But to bite the bullet: why? I feel like people do that all the time and it seems fairly effective as a coping mechanism. A kid will die and the religious will talk about God's plan or whatever. Death scares us, so people believe in heaven.
It is an effective coping mechanism, but it's picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. It dramatically reduces your ability to think clearly about changes in your situation that, prior to changing your views, you would have wanted to act on.
In the death case, for instance, cryo looks better than it used to. In other cases: I do wonder how Shmuel in https://putanumonit.com/2016/09/16/plastic-men/ did during covid-19, when a lot of the NY Hasidic community did quite poorly.
How about we take some inspiration from the late Tom Lehrer?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MiEejaWqC2dbiezTE/i-wrote-a-song-parody
I recently made an x-risk doom playlist with that song in mind.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6O1dPXFehJ1otP8WWE0kSR?si=15-YzYSYT9K_-D4mwulw9w&utm_source=copy-link&pi=hT_OnIGMQa2UB
I really liked this piece! Thanks for writing it. I hope it helps people appreciate what it's like to face possible endings with grace and wisdom.