Personally, I have a pretty fatalistic attitude about this. If we all die, we all die. There’s nothing I can do about it. Unless you happen to be a billionaire or a person of extraordinary influence, there’s nothing you can do about it either. People I’ve known with untreatable terminal diagnoses have roughly that attitude—there’s nothing you can do about it, and you just make your peace and use whatever time is left. In a lot of ways, it’s crueler to have a treatable disease that is probably terminal but where you can try to fight. It’s better to detach.
I do feel an anxiety about the tension between the existential scenario and the scenario where AI doesn’t kill us all but takes over all the white collar jobs. There are things I could to prepare for that, but I don’t really want to do them. They’re in tension with the things I want to do if we’re all going to die. and also the ambiguity of timelines makes it impossible to know what strategies make sense (e.g., if I quit my white collar job to go to nursing school, how much time does that actually buy me? Does nursing get automated by robots quickly enough that I end up behind economically versus just milking what’s left of my career?) So, that sucks.
Another thing I find helpful is remembering that many other people have coped with alternative versions of this and managed to live their lives. At points in the Cold War, the threat of annihilation via nuclear war was probably at least as emotionally pressing for your parents/grandparents as whatever you’re feeling now. And there are plenty of examples of more discrete groups of people staring down certain or near-certain death with their faculties intact.
Personally, I have a pretty fatalistic attitude about this. If we all die, we all die. There’s nothing I can do about it. Unless you happen to be a billionaire or a person of extraordinary influence, there’s nothing you can do about it either. People I’ve known with untreatable terminal diagnoses have roughly that attitude—there’s nothing you can do about it, and you just make your peace and use whatever time is left. In a lot of ways, it’s crueler to have a treatable disease that is probably terminal but where you can try to fight. It’s better to detach.
I do feel an anxiety about the tension between the existential scenario and the scenario where AI doesn’t kill us all but takes over all the white collar jobs. There are things I could to prepare for that, but I don’t really want to do them. They’re in tension with the things I want to do if we’re all going to die. and also the ambiguity of timelines makes it impossible to know what strategies make sense (e.g., if I quit my white collar job to go to nursing school, how much time does that actually buy me? Does nursing get automated by robots quickly enough that I end up behind economically versus just milking what’s left of my career?) So, that sucks.
Another thing I find helpful is remembering that many other people have coped with alternative versions of this and managed to live their lives. At points in the Cold War, the threat of annihilation via nuclear war was probably at least as emotionally pressing for your parents/grandparents as whatever you’re feeling now. And there are plenty of examples of more discrete groups of people staring down certain or near-certain death with their faculties intact.