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This is a bit of tangent and more of a rant. (and please don't suggest intervention of any kind) > superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems t

This is a bit of tangent and more of a rant. (and please don't suggest intervention of any kind) > superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life and then this LLM/agentic world moved in, especially if they are in an industry directly and most affected this, this has been a surreal and slow Kafkaesque nightmare for a few years. The thing is with time and age passing hope keeps getting lost inch by inch and every lost bit of hope aids in killing the next bit. Then comes the sense of dread - the unchangeable reality that age passed passing means there are certain experiences and milestones that are essentially out of reach because there's no going back of this clock. So I feel a strange kind of relief about this possibility of doom. I am just sharing what I feel, and I don't feel good about feeling this sense of relief that after all it might end for us all and not just an unlucky few. This feeling and the calmness about it saddens me.

hn_throwaway_99 26d ago
As an older person, I agree with you and I'm sorry. I think about the incredible luck I had to start my career in the .com boom, to have lots of hope about technology and to have the economically valuable skills that were desired. I get angry when I see people my age or older complain about the apathy of young people. I don't like the apathy, but I find it trivially easy to see where it comes from. In many ways we broke the link between hard work and success and then get baffled and finger point when we think young folks are not as motivated as they should be.
- chasd00 26d ago
  [flagged]
cosmic_cheese 26d ago
I've been fortunate to not been impacted as severely as others, but yeah, the combo of the first half of my 30s (and everything that should've represented) going up in smoke, career continuity coming into question thanks to AI, and growing sense of overarching geopolitical, financial, and societal unease is really the worst kind of layer cake. I have to make a concerted effort to not get bogged down in it and that's getting harder all the time. If anybody is hiding a button that'd take us all back to 2012 I wish they'd just hit it already.
- ethbr1 26d ago
  > If anybody is hiding a button that'd take us all back to 2012 I wish they'd just hit it already. Historically, resets have been a global war or economic meltdown, coupled with massive government-driven redistribution supported by popular opinion. ZIRP post-COVID had a net effect of keeping the wealthy wealthy, without redistributing. For all the hay made about salary support, the Fed had more power in deciding who felt the pain.
ekidd 26d ago
> * For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life* ... > So I feel a strange kind of relief about this possibility of doom. So let me make sure I understand what you're saying. The pandemic disrupted your life plans for a few years and threw you off the track you planned? (Which does suck.) And now the possibility of actual human extinction makes you feel a strange relief? Am I understanding this correctly? If so, this is a remarkable level of something. Depression? Nihilism? Jealousy? Something else? Imagining total human extinction and feeling relief is not a healthy state of mind. And, yeah, you seem to know this. But I kind of wish we could reach some sort of broad public agreement that human extinction would be bad. And if it ever looks like it might happen, we should fight for human survival.
- cosmic_cheese 26d ago
  Something something Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. While I don't necessarily endorse the view, it's understandable that one might find it difficult to care much about the bigger picture when it feels like their own life is destined for a doom-spiral.
- apsurd 26d ago
  There's nuance though. Poetry even. > we should fight for human survival All problems arise from this statement. It's baked in us and it's why we do in fact survive. But it isn't so neatly righteous. When we struggle to agree on what defines a human, who ought to have rights, and basic equality, it's easy to see how much harm "we should fight for survival" does.
  - ekidd 26d ago
    > > we should fight for human survival > All problems arise from this statement. Let me go on the record, then: Given a choice between every living human being becoming absolutely, for-real dead and the human species surviving, then I come down on the side of human survival. There are too many humans that I love personally, and too many innocent people just going about their lives that I would like to protect. Given a choice between the mass death of billions, and their survival, I choose survival. Human rights are essential. But human rights are difficult to achieve if everyone is dead.
mannanj 26d ago
Have you considered getting involved in local civics? I only ask because like you, I felt similar. But I also grew up (I’m 35 now) with a big disconnect from civics life and always felt “someone else would save me”. Now I see I was the problem all along: I never participated in what was a fragile and very delicate system of governance which requires my participation. Still figuring out what that looks like, but first confronting that my actions “didn’t change anything” (which I’m sure you can admit is a big propagandistic myth to disempower us) let me take my first tiny action locally which is reach out to my civics association for signage repair. I suspect from there I will level up and better understand my government to play a role in shaping it. I’m also building something to solve this problem of low participation which is exciting!
- litmus-pit-git 26d ago
  I know where you are coming from. I do engage with the society while not in the way you've mentioned. Very regularly attend plays, meet a few friends (the number has reduced but these few have been regular), play team/group sports every day. There's place I go to teach twice a week. There are few other things. But let's not get into that. It all feels empty now. Motions. The hope of a personal and intimate future is just gone. See, the personal life is dead to me (I've not given up, no. It's not just there!). At least what and who would have been accessible to me in 2020 and it was. I spent quite some time to bring my physical fitness, health, got back to sports and I was so happy. There was that glimmer. Then a mass layoff and sadly at the same time the burnout meant I was not ready to look again but I kept on rest of the things. And when I tried to get back to things it was evident that the ground beneath shifted entirely. Now, it seems, there's no point. Not in the defeatist way, because I've seen that "there's no point" before, but in the sense that there is really no point. I am about to be 40 in a few months time and almost every venues are closed to me to explore social life in any meaningful way I'd find desirable. In some settings the fact that I have financially independent and have decades of runaway for my currency and lifestyle doesn't matter. Everything gets tied to employment and even then when you look around, whether it's finding a group or exploring looking for a partner (especially this!), it all feels bizarre and completely alien. It's not only the double whammy of two events that wiped out my early and mid 30s, but it also depends on what society and culture I am in at this juncture. And no it's not my fault or anyone's but this happened, and not being alone in it doesn't make it any better. Do I feel fortunate? Well, that's the wrong question, because when you are unhappy with your pair of shoes, you can always find someone without any shoes and I wish we functioned that way, with that arithmetic rationality, but we don't; at least I don't. The biggest problem is - the wish to live this life (I don't even have any doubt there, because if I had it would have been simpler) and wish to do something and dreams of a fulfilling, exciting, and passionate personal life hasn't diminished a bit, but, at the same time it is clear that there's no more of that - most of that. That's the gripe - this tug. (Hey, thank you for engaging with me. This was very kind of you. Even though this is not really hn discussion material so I can't even explain what I am going through. I might even make it look like everything is fine, and even hunky dory for me, and I am just whining. Or maybe I am).
altmanaltman 26d ago
I mean clearly what you are talking about is a personal feeling here. You mention it saddens you and that is the concerning part imo but you also said no intervention bs so I will just share my counter factual: I am also kind of okay if the world ends tomorrow, to me it never mattered in the first place. But that feeling doesn't sadden me. I feel it frees me because I don't think of life as a very very serious thing and I feel there is a certain kind of lightness you can afford when you fundamentally don't care if you/the entire world ends tomorrow. I still love people and I still love my life and I don't want any harm to anyone. So I do feel the same calmness that you kind of talk about (for life in general aside from just AI killing us all) but my interpretation of it doesn't sadden me. If it did, I would really investigate why I interpret it that way, it might help you discover yourself. There is no shame in being okay with the world ending imo but there is sin in willing it or contributing to it because one thinks its inevitable. Furthermore, I also believe that we only get 1 life which is temporal and fundamentally doesn't have any meaning. How you live every day is how you live every day. We can suffer, we can cry, we can feel sad and for very good reasons but our relationship with ourself shapes our entire lives. If something constantly makes us sad, we should examine it to understand where that really comes from.
apsurd 26d ago
"If a death ray comes from the sky and obliterates the entire planet, at least we all go together." There is something comforting about being together with the human race even in doom. Perhaps especially in doom.
- litmus-pit-git 26d ago
  Well, that's a way to look at it :)
- talon8635 26d ago
  Not if the human race we’re hunkered down with are unhinged disregulated automatons
fwlr 26d ago
I have similar feelings, you’re not alone (nor alone in being saddened by it). Things seem to me to be more or less playing out the way I interpreted existential risk researchers saying it would, so there’s a strange relief in knowing the general shape of what is to come.
- sznio 26d ago
  >Things seem to me to be more or less playing out the way I interpreted existential risk researchers saying it would hmm, what did you read? I'm curious.
  - fwlr 26d ago
    The combined intellectual output of the field, across books, lectures, blog posts, verbal discussion in professional and personal capacities (many of them are friends or acquaintances), for about a decade. It’s just not possible to neatly condense that into a book recommendation, unfortunately. I can give you the flavor of it, at least, with this excerpt: (Please excuse the archaic terminology of “robot” for LLM/agent, this was written in 2014 and LLMs weren’t invented until 3 years later) In the face of continuing debate about this point, I continue to think it obvious that robots will push humans out of work or at least drive down wages (which, in the existence of a minimum wage, pushes humans out of work). Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point. - from Meditations on Moloch

hn_throwaway_99 26d ago

As an older person, I agree with you and I'm sorry. I think about the incredible luck I had to start my career in the .com boom, to have lots of hope about technology and to have the economically valuable skills that were desired. I get angry when I see people my age or older complain about the apathy of young people. I don't like the apathy, but I find it trivially easy to see where it comes from. In many ways we broke the link between hard work and success and then get baffled and finger point when we think young folks are not as motivated as they should be.

chasd00 26d ago
[flagged]

cosmic_cheese 26d ago

I've been fortunate to not been impacted as severely as others, but yeah, the combo of the first half of my 30s (and everything that should've represented) going up in smoke, career continuity coming into question thanks to AI, and growing sense of overarching geopolitical, financial, and societal unease is really the worst kind of layer cake. I have to make a concerted effort to not get bogged down in it and that's getting harder all the time. If anybody is hiding a button that'd take us all back to 2012 I wish they'd just hit it already.

ethbr1 26d ago
> If anybody is hiding a button that'd take us all back to 2012 I wish they'd just hit it already. Historically, resets have been a global war or economic meltdown, coupled with massive government-driven redistribution supported by popular opinion. ZIRP post-COVID had a net effect of keeping the wealthy wealthy, without redistributing. For all the hay made about salary support, the Fed had more power in deciding who felt the pain.

ekidd 26d ago

> * For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life* ... > So I feel a strange kind of relief about this possibility of doom. So let me make sure I understand what you're saying. The pandemic disrupted your life plans for a few years and threw you off the track you planned? (Which does suck.) And now the possibility of actual human extinction makes you feel a strange relief? Am I understanding this correctly? If so, this is a remarkable level of something. Depression? Nihilism? Jealousy? Something else? Imagining total human extinction and feeling relief is not a healthy state of mind. And, yeah, you seem to know this. But I kind of wish we could reach some sort of broad public agreement that human extinction would be bad. And if it ever looks like it might happen, we should fight for human survival.

cosmic_cheese 26d ago
Something something Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. While I don't necessarily endorse the view, it's understandable that one might find it difficult to care much about the bigger picture when it feels like their own life is destined for a doom-spiral.
apsurd 26d ago
There's nuance though. Poetry even. > we should fight for human survival All problems arise from this statement. It's baked in us and it's why we do in fact survive. But it isn't so neatly righteous. When we struggle to agree on what defines a human, who ought to have rights, and basic equality, it's easy to see how much harm "we should fight for survival" does.
- ekidd 26d ago
  > > we should fight for human survival > All problems arise from this statement. Let me go on the record, then: Given a choice between every living human being becoming absolutely, for-real dead and the human species surviving, then I come down on the side of human survival. There are too many humans that I love personally, and too many innocent people just going about their lives that I would like to protect. Given a choice between the mass death of billions, and their survival, I choose survival. Human rights are essential. But human rights are difficult to achieve if everyone is dead.

mannanj 26d ago

Have you considered getting involved in local civics? I only ask because like you, I felt similar. But I also grew up (I’m 35 now) with a big disconnect from civics life and always felt “someone else would save me”. Now I see I was the problem all along: I never participated in what was a fragile and very delicate system of governance which requires my participation. Still figuring out what that looks like, but first confronting that my actions “didn’t change anything” (which I’m sure you can admit is a big propagandistic myth to disempower us) let me take my first tiny action locally which is reach out to my civics association for signage repair. I suspect from there I will level up and better understand my government to play a role in shaping it. I’m also building something to solve this problem of low participation which is exciting!

litmus-pit-git 26d ago
I know where you are coming from. I do engage with the society while not in the way you've mentioned. Very regularly attend plays, meet a few friends (the number has reduced but these few have been regular), play team/group sports every day. There's place I go to teach twice a week. There are few other things. But let's not get into that. It all feels empty now. Motions. The hope of a personal and intimate future is just gone. See, the personal life is dead to me (I've not given up, no. It's not just there!). At least what and who would have been accessible to me in 2020 and it was. I spent quite some time to bring my physical fitness, health, got back to sports and I was so happy. There was that glimmer. Then a mass layoff and sadly at the same time the burnout meant I was not ready to look again but I kept on rest of the things. And when I tried to get back to things it was evident that the ground beneath shifted entirely. Now, it seems, there's no point. Not in the defeatist way, because I've seen that "there's no point" before, but in the sense that there is really no point. I am about to be 40 in a few months time and almost every venues are closed to me to explore social life in any meaningful way I'd find desirable. In some settings the fact that I have financially independent and have decades of runaway for my currency and lifestyle doesn't matter. Everything gets tied to employment and even then when you look around, whether it's finding a group or exploring looking for a partner (especially this!), it all feels bizarre and completely alien. It's not only the double whammy of two events that wiped out my early and mid 30s, but it also depends on what society and culture I am in at this juncture. And no it's not my fault or anyone's but this happened, and not being alone in it doesn't make it any better. Do I feel fortunate? Well, that's the wrong question, because when you are unhappy with your pair of shoes, you can always find someone without any shoes and I wish we functioned that way, with that arithmetic rationality, but we don't; at least I don't. The biggest problem is - the wish to live this life (I don't even have any doubt there, because if I had it would have been simpler) and wish to do something and dreams of a fulfilling, exciting, and passionate personal life hasn't diminished a bit, but, at the same time it is clear that there's no more of that - most of that. That's the gripe - this tug. (Hey, thank you for engaging with me. This was very kind of you. Even though this is not really hn discussion material so I can't even explain what I am going through. I might even make it look like everything is fine, and even hunky dory for me, and I am just whining. Or maybe I am).

altmanaltman 26d ago

I mean clearly what you are talking about is a personal feeling here. You mention it saddens you and that is the concerning part imo but you also said no intervention bs so I will just share my counter factual: I am also kind of okay if the world ends tomorrow, to me it never mattered in the first place. But that feeling doesn't sadden me. I feel it frees me because I don't think of life as a very very serious thing and I feel there is a certain kind of lightness you can afford when you fundamentally don't care if you/the entire world ends tomorrow. I still love people and I still love my life and I don't want any harm to anyone. So I do feel the same calmness that you kind of talk about (for life in general aside from just AI killing us all) but my interpretation of it doesn't sadden me. If it did, I would really investigate why I interpret it that way, it might help you discover yourself. There is no shame in being okay with the world ending imo but there is sin in willing it or contributing to it because one thinks its inevitable. Furthermore, I also believe that we only get 1 life which is temporal and fundamentally doesn't have any meaning. How you live every day is how you live every day. We can suffer, we can cry, we can feel sad and for very good reasons but our relationship with ourself shapes our entire lives. If something constantly makes us sad, we should examine it to understand where that really comes from.

apsurd 26d ago

"If a death ray comes from the sky and obliterates the entire planet, at least we all go together." There is something comforting about being together with the human race even in doom. Perhaps especially in doom.

litmus-pit-git 26d ago
Well, that's a way to look at it :)
talon8635 26d ago
Not if the human race we’re hunkered down with are unhinged disregulated automatons

fwlr 26d ago

I have similar feelings, you’re not alone (nor alone in being saddened by it). Things seem to me to be more or less playing out the way I interpreted existential risk researchers saying it would, so there’s a strange relief in knowing the general shape of what is to come.

sznio 26d ago
>Things seem to me to be more or less playing out the way I interpreted existential risk researchers saying it would hmm, what did you read? I'm curious.
- fwlr 26d ago
  The combined intellectual output of the field, across books, lectures, blog posts, verbal discussion in professional and personal capacities (many of them are friends or acquaintances), for about a decade. It’s just not possible to neatly condense that into a book recommendation, unfortunately. I can give you the flavor of it, at least, with this excerpt: (Please excuse the archaic terminology of “robot” for LLM/agent, this was written in 2014 and LLMs weren’t invented until 3 years later) In the face of continuing debate about this point, I continue to think it obvious that robots will push humans out of work or at least drive down wages (which, in the existence of a minimum wage, pushes humans out of work). Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point. - from Meditations on Moloch