Emotional Health in the face of the AI Situation
I don't have any great answers. Would love to hear your thoughts! Here's mine.
Common sense things:
- Get good sleep.
- Have awesome social interactions.
- Have mindful technology use -- for instance
pluck + block everythingfor an hour if distracted / proactively if need to focus.
Other things:
- It's not useful to feel a strong negative emotional reaction every time there is an announcement about capabilities increasing.
- "OpenAI is announcing that it's paving over Texas with GPUs, or opening some island large nuclear power plant and Trump is lifting all the energy regulations so that we can race to AI as fast as possible. And OpenAI just released their agent, and etc".
- I mean okay, I didn't know that this would happen.
- But I kind of thought something like this would happen.
- And I had already "second order updated" --- my prediction about risk is due to expecting to have more "unexpected" acceleration factors in the future. Because this seems to keep happening and it's silly to always update towards being more pessimistic every time!
- If staying up to date on capabilities is distracting/distressing me then I shouldn't do it.
Probably "major course corrections" are only appropriate once per quarter. So limiting news ingestion to like once per month might be reasonable if possible. I'd like to stay tied to reality.
General approach:
Don't indulge in self-pity.
Do focus on good actions that I can take.
Don't call people evil or spend too much time being upset about people being irresponsible.
Do think about some cool, useful problems.
Don't spend too much time being distressed when people don't react to the issue like I wish they would.
Do keep talking to people about this.
Don't focus on things that you think you "deserved" and will miss out on.
Do focus on awesome experiences that I'm having -- not with the feeling of regret for how short they are, but with the feeling of awesomeness that they can happen.
Don't wait to do things
Do act now
#life