Three years ago I also felt very anxious about the possibility that everyone I loved could be dead in a few years and managed to disconnect emotionally from it after a while, which helped. I focused on other things than AI risk afterwards. Recently I decided that I no longer just want to sit and watch, and instead want to Actually Do Something About It.
Engaging with the topic again also brought the anxiety and grimness back, this time more concretely and viscerally than before. Two things helped me the most to not despair, while at the same time also not denying my feelings and instead channeling them into resolve:
Talking to other people about it, in real life: Participating at PauseAI PauseCon last month and meeting lots of people who model the desire and calmness to effectively engage with the issue, in order to increase the probability of the counter-possibility of everyone not dying within a few years. And also hosting an event at my home for my friends to introduce them to AI X-risk as well as to recent developments, and then giving us space to talk about each of our personal experiences and thoughts.
Three years ago I also felt very anxious about the possibility that everyone I loved could be dead in a few years and managed to disconnect emotionally from it after a while, which helped. I focused on other things than AI risk afterwards. Recently I decided that I no longer just want to sit and watch, and instead want to Actually Do Something About It.
Engaging with the topic again also brought the anxiety and grimness back, this time more concretely and viscerally than before. Two things helped me the most to not despair, while at the same time also not denying my feelings and instead channeling them into resolve:
Reminding myself that the world is Dark, not colorless as part of re-reading the Replacing Guilt sequence (there is also a nice podcast reading of it). See the recent post Distilling Replacing Guilt for an overview of the sequence.
Talking to other people about it, in real life: Participating at PauseAI PauseCon last month and meeting lots of people who model the desire and calmness to effectively engage with the issue, in order to increase the probability of the counter-possibility of everyone not dying within a few years. And also hosting an event at my home for my friends to introduce them to AI X-risk as well as to recent developments, and then giving us space to talk about each of our personal experiences and thoughts.