Disjointed AI thoughts and feelings which end abruplty

It feels like a sci-fi novel. And not a very good one. The sense of the surreal isn’t helped by plausibly the most powerful man in the world being something of a cartoon.

Part of me is still holding out for it to be some kind of hoax or con. Ooops, I ended up in a doomsday cult, oh well, at least we’re not all going to die.

My mother told me that throughout her teens and twenties she believed that everyone was going to die in a nuclear war. I’m hoping for something similar, but it’s feeling harder to maintain as fears go mainstream.

Very plausibly we won’t all die, though it does seem like the end of life as we know it. I like to complain about my life but I’m also quite attached to it. I don’t really want to be posthuman, I just want normal life but slightly better.

I don’t really have plans or fantasies longer than a couple of years. Previously I might idly daydream about how I’d raise children or what retirement would be like. This no longer seems to happen. When I try to imagine the future now I get a 404 error. Occasionally I get flashes of imagery from The Day After Tomorrow which I haven’t actually seen, but have seen the trailer for.

When I listened to the Rest of History’s episodes on WW1 I felt an odd sense of kinship hearing about those under siege by the Russian army at Przemyśl.

It’s hard to orient to on a personal level. How does one prepare for the future? One of the most plausible actions seems to be to build up one’s reserves of general purpose tradeable tokens. This feels gross to me. I expect there’s some blindness here as well. It seems like I can maintain working on things broadly related to AI safety without looking directly into the eyes of the beast, but taking actions to influence how I will appear in the future, well that’s a bit much.

It’s unclear if there’s anything I can do about the whole situation more broadly.

There is one voice in my head that says ‘Well, there is a possible world where you try really hard and I don’t know become the president or something (after somehow becoming a natural born citizen of the US), and then once you’ve done that you can probably somehow steer to safety. So stop fannying around and get on with it’

I have some hesitations about listening too closely to this voice in my head.

Perhaps singlehandedly saving the world is slightly too ambitious a target, and a more appropriate aim would be more something like joining/ finding one’s role in the war effort.

I also have some hesitations about this.

At some workshops I’ve been to there’s an institution designed to combat messy situations known as the 5-minute tidy. Someone will notice the creeping invasion of physical chaos, and boldly bugle ‘5-minute tidy’. This decrees a state of emergency and requires all citizens to do their duty to king and workshop. Loud music is played, limbs move, objects are moved and so on.

A difficulty I’ve found is that it’s often unclear where objects go and whether they are still in use. Plausibly the right response here would be to take a minute to think about what actually needs doing and how to do it. But somehow I usually end up hypnotised by the high bpm music and visibly moving limbs everywhere that I instead respond to this by picking up an object and walking around purposefully, or diligently straightening cushions, or drawing Lord Kitchener’s face.

Anyway, I have some suspicion of being in the middle of an ?-year tidy. To be fair to the 5-minute tidy, it does typically result in a significant victory over the forces of chaos.