Makes sense. Surely there were many cases in which our ancestors’ “family and/or friends and/or tribe were facing extinction,” and going insane in those situations would’ve been really maladaptive! If anything, the people worried about AI x-risk have a more historically-normal amount of worry-about-death than most other people today.
They didn’t need to deal with social media informing them that they need to be traumatized now, and form a conditional prediction of extreme and self-destructive behavior later.
There actually are rising cases of “mental ill-health” right now. Here in the UK, services are swamped. I’m sure some of this is due to an attitude change, in that people now refer to anything from a minor upset, or a slight difference in neurological function, to normal emotions such as grief, shame and regret, as a mental illness.
Previously the attitude in the post-war generation was more like Truman’s toward Oppenheimer: “Blood on his hands; damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it”. (Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center; by Ray Monk.)
Bellyaching, cutting people out of one’s life due to some human imperfection, and turning to substance abuse, all seem to be excused under this mental health label, as if the difficulties the world is facing right now are already sufficient to trigger the insanity expectation.
I’m grateful to you for this article, which I intend to take very seriously, because it provides the tools we need to arm ourselves against succumbing to stresses of every kind, as well as coping better with everyday life today and in the future, however long that might be.
Makes sense. Surely there were many cases in which our ancestors’ “family and/or friends and/or tribe were facing extinction,” and going insane in those situations would’ve been really maladaptive! If anything, the people worried about AI x-risk have a more historically-normal amount of worry-about-death than most other people today.
They didn’t need to deal with social media informing them that they need to be traumatized now, and form a conditional prediction of extreme and self-destructive behavior later.
There actually are rising cases of “mental ill-health” right now. Here in the UK, services are swamped. I’m sure some of this is due to an attitude change, in that people now refer to anything from a minor upset, or a slight difference in neurological function, to normal emotions such as grief, shame and regret, as a mental illness.
Previously the attitude in the post-war generation was more like Truman’s toward Oppenheimer: “Blood on his hands; damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it”. (Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center; by Ray Monk.)
Bellyaching, cutting people out of one’s life due to some human imperfection, and turning to substance abuse, all seem to be excused under this mental health label, as if the difficulties the world is facing right now are already sufficient to trigger the insanity expectation.
I’m grateful to you for this article, which I intend to take very seriously, because it provides the tools we need to arm ourselves against succumbing to stresses of every kind, as well as coping better with everyday life today and in the future, however long that might be.