I’m a doctor, relatively freshly graduated and a citizen of India.
Back when I was entering med school, I was already intimately aware of AI X-risk from following LW and Scott, but at the time, the timelines didn’t appear so distressingly short, not like Metaculus predicting a mean time to human level AGI of 2035 as it was last time I checked.
I expected that to become a concern in the 2040s and 50s, and as such I was more concerned with automation induced unemployment, which I did (and still do) expect to be a serious concern for even highly skilled professionals by the 30s.
As such, I was happy at the time to have picked a profession that would be towards the end of the list for being automated away, or at least the last one I had aptitude for, I don’t think I’d make a good ML researcher for example, likely the final field to be eaten alive by its own creations. A concrete example even within medicine would be avoiding imaging based fields like radiology, and also practical ones like surgery, as ML-vision and softbody robotics leap ahead. In contrast, places where human contact is craved and held in high esteem (perhaps irrationally) like psychiatry are safer bets, or at least the least bad choice. Regulatory inertia is my best, and likely only, friend, because assuming institutions similar to those of today (justified by the short horizon), it might be several years before an autonomous surgical robot is demonstrably superior to the median surgeon, and it’s legal for a hospital to use them and the public cottons onto the fact that they’re a superior product.
I had expected to have enough time to establish myself as a consultant, and to have saved enough money to insulate myself from the concerns of a world where UBI isn’t actually rolled out, while emigrating to a First World country that could actually afford UBI, to become a citizen within the window of time where the host country is willing to naturalize me and thus accept a degree of obligation to keep me alive and fed. They latter is a serious concern in India, volatile as it already is, and while I might be well-off by local standards, unless you’re a multimillionaire in USD, you can’t use investor backdoors to flee to countries like Australia and Singapore, and unless you’re a billionaire, you can’t insulate yourself in the middle of a nation that is rapidly melting down as its only real advantage, cheap and cheerful labor, is completely devalued.
You either have the money (like the West) to buy the fruits of automation and then build the factories for it, or you have the factories (like China) which will be automated first and then can be taxed as needed. India, and much of South Asia and Africa, have neither.
Right now, it looks to me that the period of severe unemployment will be both soon and short, unlikely to be more than a few years before capable nearhuman AGI reach parity and then superhuman status. I don’t expect an outright FOOM of days or weeks, but a relatively rapid change on the order of years nonetheless.
That makes my existing savings likely sufficient for weathering the storm, and I seek to emigrate very soon. Ideally, I’ll be a citizen of the country of my choice within 7 years, which is already pushing it, but then it’ll be significantly easier for me to evacuate my family should it become necessary by giving them a place to move to, if they’re willing and able to liquidate their assets in time.
But at the end of the day, my approach is aimed at the timeline (which I still consider less likely than not) of a delayed AGI rollout with a protracted period of widespread Humans Need Not Apply in place.
Why?
Because in the case of a rapid takeoff, I have no expectations of contributing meaningfully to Alignment, I don’t have the maths skills for it, and even my initial plans of donating have been obviated by the billions now pouring into EA and adjacent Alignment research, be it in the labs of the giants or more grassroots concerns like Eleuther AI etc. I’m mostly helpless in that regard, but I still try and spread the word in rat-adjacent circles when I can, because I think convincing arguments are >> than my measly Third World salary. My competitive advantage is in spreading awareness and dispelling misconceptions in the people who have the money and talent to do something about it, and while that would be akin to teaching my grandma to suck eggs on LessWrong, there are still plenty of forums where I can call myself better informed than 99% of the otherwise smart and capable denizens, even if that’s a low bar to best.
However, at the end of the day, I’m hedging against a world where it doesn’t happen, because the arrival of AGI is either going to fix everything or kill us all, as far as I’m concerned. You can’t hide, and if you run, you’ll just die tired, as Martian colonies have an asteroid dropped on them, and whatever pathetic escape craft we make in the next 20 years get swatted before they reach the orbit of Saturn.
If things surprisingly go slower than expected, I hope to make enough money to FIRE and live off dividends, while also aggressively seeking every comparative advantage I can get, such as being an early-ish adopter of BCI tech (i.e. not going for the first Neuralink rollout but the one after, when the major bugs have been dealt with), so that I can at least survive the heightened competition with other humans.
I do wish I had more time, as I genuinely expect to more likely be dead by my 40s than not, but that’s balanced out by the wonders that await should things go according to plan, and I don’t think that, if given the choice, I would have chosen to be alive at any other time in history. I fully intend to marry and have kids, even if I must come to terms that they’ll likely not make it past childhood.. After all, if I had been killed by a falling turtle at the ripe old age of 5, I’d still rather have lived than not, and unless living standards are visibly deteriorating with no hope in sight, I think my child will have a life worth living, however short.
Also, I expect the end to be quick and largely painless. An unaligned AGI is unlikely to derive any value from torturing us, and would most likely dispatch us dispassionately and efficiently, probably before we can process what’s actually happening, and even if that’s not the case and I have to witness the biosphere being rapidly dismantled for parts, or if things really go to hell and the other prospect is starving to death, then I trust that I have the skills and conviction to manufacture a cleaner end for myself and the ones I’ve failed..
Even if it was originally intended as a curse, “may you live in interesting times” is still a boon as far as I’m concerned..
TL;DR: Shortened planning windows, conservative financial decisions, reduction in personal volatility by leaving the regions of the planet that will be first to go FUBAR, not aiming for the kinds of specialization programs that will take greater than 10 years to complete, and overall conserving my energy for scenarios in which we don’t all horribly die regardless of my best contributions.
A similar phenomenon is at play in modern Western discussion around age-gap relationships.
Anyone admitting that they experienced one when they were young is almost inevitably told that they were abused, and made to feel that they were suppressing some deep-seated trauma over any and all protestations that they’re fine, no really, it wasn’t that big of a deal.
In fact, on Reddit and other places, I’ve seen people get downvoted if they persist in claims that they didn’t experience any notable negative sequelae. The same people who did the downvoting are often the ones who claim to value “lived experience” above all else, but perish the thought that your lived experience should clash with social orthodoxy.
In India, we have within living memory people who got married off at the ripe young age of 12 to 14, and grew old and have grandkids with kids of their own. The vast majority of them are well-adjusted, at least compared to their age cohort, and many of the women (because they make ever larger fractions of the population pyramid as men die off faster) had husbands who were older than them by numbers that modern Westerners would immediately see as red flags.
A funny example would be Emmanuel Macron, who was 15 when he met his 40 year old teacher who he’s still married to, for all that he’s pushing up against the limits of what can be called “success”, he’s often pointed to as a poor victim who can’t even perceive his own trauma. Really headscratching that.
I studied in a Christian school, and we were sex-segregated until we made it into college. I’m intimately familiar with hundreds of adolescent boys who spent their time lusting after their female teachers, who were the only woman they saw most of their days. If anyone of them had managed to sleep with one, he’d have been receiving high-fives until the day he died, for all the protestations that he was horribly abused.
And of course, that’s just for boys, who can sometimes get away with admissions of that nature. If a girl were to have the same story..
Similarly, the bigger a deal parents make out of a child’s injuries (voluntarily or not), the worse the perceived pain for a child:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24494782/
“Hierarchical multiple regression and path analyses indicated that parent posttraumatic stress reactions contributed significantly to the development and maintenance of child PTSS. Other risk factors for child PTSS included premorbid emotional and behavioral difficulties and larger burn size. Risk factors identified for parent PTSS included prior trauma history, acute distress, greater number of child invasive procedures, guilt, and child PTSS.”
While in the context of burn injuries, it certainly lines up with more anecdotal evidence of toddlers injuring themselves, looking at their parents, and if seeing a great deal of concern, then bursting into tears. Encouraging pain seems to exacerbate pain.
Edit:
While on the topic of more unpopular/unacceptable opinions to air in Western society, parental reactions to miscarriage or infant mortality:
Till not very long ago at all, childhood mortality was considered a fact of life. People mostly treated the death of a child as bad, but not life-disrupting as so many people do today. A miscarriage is a cause for mourning and great outpourings of social concern for the bereaved couple, who in turn display great stress and trauma from the event. This is not to minimize their pain, it very much is real, but the sheer magnitude of it is far larger than it ever was (or even is, Indian women typically don’t react that way to a miscarriage, I’ve handled plenty, and the ones who do are almost guaranteed to be the ones exposed to Western takes on the matter.)
Of course, the death of a child is considerably more surprising than it once was, we can quite easily expect a child born healthy today to have a ~99% chance of making it to adulthood, versus ~50% at the turn of the century. But people genuinely used to accept that they might lose half their kids before they made it out of childhood, and hedged accordingly by having massively higher birth rates. They couldn’t afford to shutdown and go into shock at the loss of one, and thus generally didn’t do so as a matter of course nor were they expected to.
I could accept the shock easier when it happens to a once healthy child, whereas early miscarriages haven’t had the same effect.
Trends in Self-reported Spontaneous Abortions: 1970–2000
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3787708/
“Little is known about how the miscarriage rate has changed over the past few decades in the United States. Data from Cycles IV to VI of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) were used to examine trends from 1970 to 2000. After accounting for abortion availability and the characteristics of pregnant women, the rate of reported miscarriages increased by about 1.0% per year. This upward trend is strongest in the first seven weeks and absent after 12 weeks of pregnancy. African American and Hispanic women report lower rates of early miscarriage than do whites. The probability of reporting a miscarriage rises by about 5% per year of completed schooling. The upward trend, especially in early miscarriages, suggests awareness of pregnancy rather than prenatal care to be a key factor in explaining the evolution of self-reported miscarriages. Any beneficial effects of prenatal care on early miscarriage are obscured by this factor.”
Even with the relative paucity of data, I would support the conclusion that this is likely due to increased maternal age more than anything else. Which is why it’s all the more perplexing that miscarriages are considered to be among the most traumatic possible events in a couple’s life, in what is likely a self-fulfilling prophecy.