Ozy in Asterisk on coping with AI doom

I wrote an article for Asterisk Magazine about people who believe in AI superintelligence soon, and who are chill about it. Check it out!

Here’s a quote:

“I was born with a terminal condition,” said Matthew Gray, a board member at the existential risk community-building nonprofit Lightcone Infrastructure. “We call it aging. I’ve since picked up another. We call it multiple sclerosis. And AI is a third one on top. I’m not very worried about degenerating from multiple sclerosis because I’m pretty sure the robots will kill me first, just like I wasn’t that worried about aging-related deterioration because multiple sclerosis will get me first.”

From this perspective, AI doomers don’t face a new problem; they face the oldest problem humanity has ever faced.

I pushed back. If I look at an actuarial table, I can expect another 47 years of life. I’d be pretty upset to discover I had only five.

This, my interviewees thought, was naive. Even without AI risk, I could have been hit by a car; I could have gotten cancer; I could have been nuked in a hot war between Russia and the United States. It’s not that the difference in probability doesn’t matter. It’s worse to be certain that I’ll die in five years than to have a 50% chance of not hitting my allotted 47. But because my death has always been an inevitability, I have been coping all along with the precarity of my existence. From this perspective, AI risk isn’t shocking and unfamiliar; it’s a significantly worse version of a problem I already know I have to deal with.