Oh yes. I think for me some of this has come from the growth of the AI Safety field and the shift in the overton window around this in the time since I started thinking about it. In 2011 I had this feeling of “We are barrelling towards an apocalypse and nobody is paying it any attention”. I think a lot of my fire came from the fact that drastic things clearly needed to be done and almost nobody was doing anything, so, shit, I guess it’s on me. And now the situation has changed a fair bit, and my personal situation has changed a lot, in that I’m now surrounded by people who also care about this and are working on it, or at least recognise it as an important issue. Sys2 sees pretty clearly that what we’ve got is nowhere near enough and the problem is very far from solved, but Sys1 sees all these smart and competent people working hard on it, and feels like “Well the whole tribe is oriented to this threat pretty well, so if it can be met, we’ll meet it”. So what keeps me going is the social stuff, in the sense of “We’re all working on this thing in some way, and nobody else seems to be set up to do the specific job I’m doing, so I can be useful to the group”.
Oh yes. I think for me some of this has come from the growth of the AI Safety field and the shift in the overton window around this in the time since I started thinking about it. In 2011 I had this feeling of “We are barrelling towards an apocalypse and nobody is paying it any attention”. I think a lot of my fire came from the fact that drastic things clearly needed to be done and almost nobody was doing anything, so, shit, I guess it’s on me. And now the situation has changed a fair bit, and my personal situation has changed a lot, in that I’m now surrounded by people who also care about this and are working on it, or at least recognise it as an important issue. Sys2 sees pretty clearly that what we’ve got is nowhere near enough and the problem is very far from solved, but Sys1 sees all these smart and competent people working hard on it, and feels like “Well the whole tribe is oriented to this threat pretty well, so if it can be met, we’ll meet it”. So what keeps me going is the social stuff, in the sense of “We’re all working on this thing in some way, and nobody else seems to be set up to do the specific job I’m doing, so I can be useful to the group”.