Some of us here have grave concerns about, among other things, existential risk from AI. We think it’s very possible that timelines are short, that takeoff will be fast, that alignment is hard, and that failure will be catastrophic. Some of us think this might be true, some think it’s almost certainly true. Some of us don’t buy any of that, but may fear other disasters instead, big global ones or small deeply personal ones. These potential catastrophes are hard to reason about, and hard to cope with, emotionally.
Speaking for myself, It’s hard to look straight at the possible end of humanity, of life and love and wonder and awe and beauty, without crumpling. It’s easy to get freaked out or panic. Or to look away, try not to think about it, distract ourselves, and shuffle deck chairs.
My name is Gretta and these days I work at MIRI, one of the doomiest places around. But before I did that, I spent a bunch of years as a therapist. I learned some things about coping with fear and worry and dread. I can’t say I’ve completely solved it even for myself, much less for everyone else, But I’d like to share what’s worked for me, starting with, of all things, a Mother Goose rhyme about agency and acceptance. It goes like this:
For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.
When you are very worried about a big, complicated, intractable problem, you have to figure out what you have control over and what you don’t. Getting things filed correctly into those two buckets is pretty hard! But it’s necessary, because you treat the buckets pretty differently. For the control bucket, you need to apply agency and for the can’t-control bucket you need to apply acceptance.
I’ll talk first about the can’t-control bucket.
When it comes to existential risk and your personal control over it, that probably mostly falls into the can’t-control bucket.
People really really hate the can’t-control bucket.
They come up with lots of ways to try to dodge it. They try to stay in control of the uncontrollable, and they get really rigid and anxious. Or they get angry, not just at the problem but at everything and everyone. Or they get despondent and fall into a deep depression. We as a species are not very good at acceptance.
Acceptance looks like: seeing clearly what is going on and how limited your own role is. Allowing yourself to feel grief about your lack of power, lack of control, how sad you feel about how the future is unfolding, how much you wanted a different future, one that isn’t likely to come to pass. Trusting that you are strong enough to weather that grief. Neither shirking the grief nor dwelling in it; spending time in it for a while, setting it aside to do other things, and then returning to it later.
Really grieving is an activity, a process, something you can set out to do. It feels like: letting down your shields. Opening up, knowing that you will feel pain when you do. Feeling that pain. Co-existing with it. Letting it be.
I am in love with living and would prefer not to stop. I am a mother to three children, and when I look straight at my grief that their lives might be cut short, I can barely breathe for the sharp pain of it. But when I let myself feel that pain, I notice that I can’t actually physically sustain that fever-pitch for very long The feeling peaks. It may be incandescently intense, but then it recedes again. And then I breathe. I notice that, right now, I still exist, My children still exist. The thing I fear is possible, or maybe even probable, But it is in the future And we are here In the present.
That’s Acceptance, as I practice it.
Meanwhile, there’s the other bucket, the bucket of things we can control.
It is important, in the face of tremendous obstacles, to keep on striving. We may or may not have agency over the Actual Problem, but we have agency about something.
We don’t know what the timelines are on anything. It is too soon just to give up on everything. Human brains thrive on actually trying. Continue to try to build and grow and improve your own life, and the lives of the people around you. Make your little corner of the world better. Maybe we’ll figure out a way through the Big Bad Doom and you’ll be glad for what you’ve built. Maybe we won’t, and you’ll still be glad for what you’ve built.
Should you try to cultivate a sense of agency about the big threats yourself? I don’t know, maybe! If there is a way for you to be productive about that, then by all means! But I’m not talking, today, about solving humanity’s problems, I’m talking about how to be okay Even when you don’t know how to help, And maybe nobody really knows how to help. I’m here to give you permission to work, to strive, on something else instead, something that seems completely unrelated to the big Actual Problems. It’s okay. You can create other kinds of value, you can improve the world in other ways, and it absolutely still counts.
So that’s agency and acceptance. That’s about your orientation to the problem. What, then, about the rest of the time? How do you go about your daily life?
Humans live in the past, the present, and the future all at once, all the time. Struggling under the dark doom-clouds is mostly about a general foreboding sense of future badness, rather than about pain in the present moment. If we live too much at that broad time scale of months and years, we might fail to notice the present. We might fail to notice that right now, this very moment, we are okay, and maybe even better than okay. We have lots of kinds of moments in every day, even on the worst days. We can have good seconds and minutes and hours even while we are having bad months and years. We can connect with one another. We can hold each other, taking turns falling apart and being strong, or sometimes falling apart together. Be there for the good parts. Joy is okay. You are not bad for feeling joy.
Finally, it sure seems to me like the rules for life are changing. It’s hard to say whether tried and true strategies for plotting out our lives will continue to work or if there will be upheaval, volatility, and unpredictability. I, personally, have doubt that the old ways will still serve. Maybe you do too. My suggestion is this: Don’t frontload all the work and expect to get your payout decades later. Mix in plenty of play all the time from now on. This is probably good advice even if you don’t expect the world to end! See if you can find a point to living that is more rooted in the present and less rooted in the future. What are you here for? Who do you love? What do you enjoy? What helps you be yourself? Can you find some of that around you, right here? Not next year or after you graduate or once you’ve retired, but in the next hour or the next week? Live your life. Savor it. Be kind to other people. Don’t hold grudges. Stop doing things you hate, if you possibly can. You always knew, “life’s too short.” Well, start living like you actually believe it.
Thank you.
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