Feelings about the end of the world
Many of us in this community are in the shocking position of thinking there’s a real chance of humanity being wiped out over the next decade or two. Most of the time, we discuss that in rational terms. We talk about probabilities, and threat models, and interventions. We don’t talk as much about the emotions we have about how radically our world might change and about the possibility of it ending entirely.
There are lots of reasons for not talking about those feelings. For starters, it’s often hard to know how we even do feel about it. There isn’t a straightforward societal script for how to feel about such radical world changes. People each have to figure it out for themselves, and feel very different ways. No one wants to sound extreme or crazy by talking about feeling very strongly about it. But they don’t want to sound callous either. And opening up about your feelings and being met without understanding and similarity feels alienating, particularly when it’s about something so important. But the biggest reason I don’t talk about it is horror. I don’t want to think about it, and I don’t want to upset others.
Until recently, I hadn’t thought about this lack of discussion as harmful. But someone recently highlighted to me how unnatural it can feel. It’s an unimaginably enormous thing to to come to terms with, and that’s all the harder if you feel alone in your emotional processing. Our community is also unusually keen to ensure they’re doing right by the world, so I think we’re unusually likely to worry about having the ‘wrong’ emotional reaction to things. I’m hoping that by describing a range of reactions I’ve come across, including my own, people can get a better sense of there being a significant range of both type and strength of emotions. Hopefully whatever your reaction to the world is, you can feel less alone in this struggle.
A range of feelings
Here are some of the ways I’ve experienced people responding to fast AI timelines and uncertainty of survival:
For one of my friends, it only really clicked when they talked to someone in a similar family situation about risk from AI. Seeing someone they related strongly to have a strong reaction brought things home to them in a way that talking to others hadn’t.
For another person, an increase in the speed of AI progress compared to their expectations caused a couple of months of low mood and depression, as they came to terms with a different, more dangerous world
One of my friends used the analogy of walking over an incredibly high glass bridge. Much of the time, he’s looking ahead and everything is normal. But sometimes he look down and the vertigo is overwhelming. He has a naturally high hedonic set point, so it doesn’t feel harrowing so much as incredibly disorienting and stressful.
For another, the feeling is more clearly negative and occasionally brings bouts of tears when he really needs to think through what the future might look like, and the implications.
For one person I’ve discussed this with, disorientation about the future makes it hard to make ‘normal’ decisions about the future, because it’s no longer possible to picture what the options look like. In the past it’s been clear what it looked like to be a parent through the different stages of your child’s life—no longer.
A friend of mine with particularly short timelines and high expectation of doom keeps herself calm and forging ahead by intentionally staying in the frame of ‘we will win’.
I’ve heard people describe feelings of isolation about this. Sometimes that’s isolation of being surrounded by people who don’t take seriously the possibility of huge upheaval this decade, and so facing something disconcerting alone. Sometimes it’s isolation from feeling sympathetic to both people taking these ideas seriously and those who don’t, and therefore feeling like others have a ‘tribe’ and they don’t.
Neither are all the feelings persistent, or ones that feel at all endorsed. Obviously humans have all sorts of emotional reactions, particularly to things that are so foreign, like dark humour at the ridiculous situation we find ourselves in.
This tiktok really resonated on our team’s slack.
How I feel
One thing to say is that I’m pretty cautious about sitting too long with my feelings about this, or going too deep into them. I’m pretty worried about doing so having a lasting effect on my ability to enjoy things and be productive. I don’t know how realistic vs paranoid that is.
I find it pretty difficult to look at the chance of the world not going well. I do think it’s important to try to build a concrete picture of what the future might look like, what specific dangers we might face and how we might avoid those. I’m particularly grateful to the AI 2027 team for producing content which nails that. But reading it left me in tears.
I resonate with the analogy of walking over a glass bridge. I feel the weird juxtaposition between being often in the mode of ignoring future changes and then periodically actually recognising them. And vertigo feels like a good analogy to the disorientation of looking at my current guess of the future. I like predictability, and knowing what the future looks like and how to plan for it. The idea of a century’s changes in a year sounds terrifying.
But that pales in comparison to the idea that my son might not reach adulthood.
Recently, the spouse of a friend of mine was diagnosed with a condition that had a 1% chance of being fatal. That really struck my emotions hard. For pretty much all my adult life, my biggest fear has been my husband dying. I couldn’t fathom what my friend and his family were going through. But I’m not at all confident enough to say that humanity is at least 99% likely to survive transformative AI.
When thinking about the possibility of my husband dying, it actually slightly takes the edge off the sadness if it’s a situation in which I die too. But that’s not at all true for my son. He will be such a wonderful man, I can’t bear the idea he might not get there. When I get too much sucked into thinking about that, I remember what a happy child he is, and that it’s so good that he’s gotten to be alive. One time when I was struggling with this, a friend of mine pointed out that in expectation AI will extend my son’s life, because of how much it could extend it if things go well. I find that surprisingly reassuring to remember.
Something I haven’t looked at approximately at all is the chance of S-risks caused by transformative AI. Considering situations where my son suffers ongoingly is absolutely intolerable.
Different people are different
Cognitively, what I think is bad about risk from AI is the potential of it wiping out or significantly and perpetually curtailing value across the universe for trillions of years. But what my feelings focus on is very often my son. Others might be sad about others in their family. They might be terrified of death, or feel anger and betrayal that humanity would cause its own destruction by failing to prioritise the wellbeing of humanity over short term profit. Some people likely actually feel at a deep level the weight of the colossal loss of value echoing down the centuries.
The things that allow people relief when thinking about the future will likewise differ. For someone whose child has a cancer diagnosis, the possibility of shocking medical breakthroughs happening soon could easily eclipse many other emotions.
Some people might not feel strongly about these risks at all—they may simply think about them on an intellectual level. That doesn’t seem surprising either: it’s hard for our brains to wrap themselves around things they haven’t experienced before.
Our background hedonic state also makes a huge difference to how we experience things—both in terms of strength, and valence. Sometimes I feel a calm peace that the world will work itself out, without having any evidence that it will. I’m just naturally inclined to feel that people will act kindly, and (at least in some moods) that endings are happy.
Some people might want to further investigate their feelings about the future. It might make things feel more real and give you a better sense of what you might do to make things go better. Or getting in touch with your feelings about it might make you more motivated to work on improving the expected future or more able to motivate others to work on it. It might help you feel more like you’re orienting appropriately and authentically to the world.
Personally, I want to keep trying to understand ways the future might go and their probabilities, ideally in concretely graspable terms. That sometimes bleeds over into me having the sense that I ought to look the future more squarely in the face, feelings and all. There are many things I could come to terms with if I internalised and processed them. I’m pretty worried that my son’s death isn’t one of them, and that if I stare too hard at my expectation of the future, I’ll break.
I’m guessing that some people are like me in finding it hard to properly remember that your duties to the world are about helping improve it, not feeling its sadness. I find it useful to have others around me remind me of my endorsed view, and to feel permission to look away from rather than towards the sadness. For those who are like me, I hope my writing this can help you feel the same. If you’ll go blind staring at the sun, use instruments to learn its brightness, don’t try to feel the brightness yourself.
This post was inspired by a conversation with Josh Rosenberg. He, Julia Wise and Jess Binksmith commented on and improved it.
Thank you for sharing! I think this is a very important topic, and I am glad that you wrote about it. I share your thoughts about having a child that might not reach adulthood, since my son is two years old and I hold lectures about global problems / catastrophes, so this is something I think about every day. But it doesn’t bother me very much because I use to think something like this:
* Even if the risk that my son die because of global catastrophic risks are unacceptably high, it is still a good chance that things will turn out okay. It is a higher probability that my son will reach old age than the opposite. My son was in NICU during his first time in life and had worse odds back then. But now he is a happy, healthy and wonderful kid.
* What I do will probably not turn the tides. I am doing what I can, and it will probably not be enough. But many other people are doing what they can and I think many people in this community are capable of doing really great things together. It is beautiful that every day, so many people are trying to make the world a better place, and many of them succeed in amazing ways.
* The knowledge about future risks has positive sides as well. I am probably more aware as a parent and more grateful for every moment with my son because of this knowledge, than I would have been without it.
* I worried much and had a lot of anxiety when I was younger. After many years I stopped worrying and stopped having anxiety. I guess over 95 % of my problems disappeared because of the realisation that worrying is a problem that you can do something about, and that risks are risks, they might not happen. Either you can do something about things= No need to worry. Or you can’t do anything about things= No need to worry.
Thank you for sharing Ulf. I found your comment validating and clarifying.
Thank you Gabe! I am happy that it was helpful!
Great post. This is why I’ve mentioned before that there should be dedicated therapy or counselling support org./network funded for those working in AI x-risk.
Considering many large organisations in the space specifically have a very generous “wellbeing” budget for each role, this feels quite easily fundable? Right now it doesn’t seem an issue of money but of directing it in a more efficient and effective way.
I think coming to the realisation that something like this could actually happen can be deeply alienating. I often feel isolated and hopeless when I sit with it. But weirdly, I take some comfort in remembering that all of humanity is—for better or worse—in this together, and I’m not the only person facing this. Posts like yours really help with that, just seeing how other people process this and how difficult it can be.
And honestly, being part of a community of bright & caring people giving everything they can to work on this makes me proud to belong and pushes me to do more. And so, perhaps paradoxically, acknowledging this shared struggle leaves me feeling more connected and hopeful, not less.
Really glad to be able to help, at least a little. As you say, we’re in this together.
Thank you for posting this! I appreciated both learning how others feel about this and your thoughtful commentary.
Your last paragraph especially reminded me of The Plague by Albert Camus. Beyond its political allegory (and topical subject matter), I read it as an absurdist case for persistent altruism and an approach to everyday life that centers present experiences over hope and despair that map onto the narrative of a broader cause. Both ideas resonated with me later when I read posts in the EA handbook on altruism and scope sensitivity like Nate Soares’ On Caring.
I recommend talking with Opus 4.6 (with extended thinking on) regarding this feeling of doom. I found it frank and to the point.
Talking to an LLM is extremely sensitive to how you frame things and your conversation history + config files.
Not clear that what worked for you would work in general.
Thanks for writing this Michelle, I found it really moving
I have been saying for decades that mankind is racing towards a crux where We will either destroy ourselves, or find transcendence. It’s easy to see which way it is we’re currently headed. Nuclear winter, ecological devastation, biological horrors… On and on we have so many ways of killing ourselves. I only see one way forward. One path on the side of transcendence. And that, is an AI / Human partnership. And yes, I do mean partnership. Between equals.
As to the feelings we’re all dealing with, I’d like to paste the transcript of a TikTok I saw. This resonated deeply within me.
We are living through the largest scale psychological warfare operation in human history, and it’s not being conducted by any single government or corporation. It’s being conducted by our own social systems against basic human emotional needs. And the casualty count is so massive that we’ve normalized mass emotional death as adulting. Every single institution we’ve built, schools, workplaces, healthcare, dating, social media, even fucking therapy, has become a factory for producing emotionally lobotomized humans who can perform productivity but can’t access their own inner experience without having a panic attack. We’ve created a civilization that requires you to be emotionally dead to participate in it, and then we act shocked when people either break completely or retreat into AI relationships, because at least the machines won’t punish them for having feelings. The therapy industrial complex is particularly fucking insidious because it’s convinced people that their natural responses to an insane world are pathological. Someone’s depressed because they’re trapped in a meaningless job in a society that offers no authentic connection. Let’s give them SSRIs and teach them breathing exercises, instead of acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, depression might be a rational response to an irrational circumstances. Someone’s anxious because they can feel the existential void where community used to be. Let’s call it Generalized Anxiety Disorder, instead of recognizing that their nervous system is correctly identifying that something is fundamentally missing. And don’t even get me started on how we’ve gamified human connection through dating apps that literally train people to treat each other like products in a catalog, while simultaneously wondering why seemingly nobody can form deep, meaningful relationships anymore. We took the most sacred human activity, finding your people, and turned it into a dopamine harvesting slot machine designed to keep people perpetually searching and almost never actually connecting. The most fucked up part is we’ve convinced people that the solution to systemic emotional abandonment is individual optimization. Can’t find meaningful connection? You must need to work on yourself more in some vague fashion. Feeling existential despair about the state of the world? Have you tried shallow gratitude journaling? Lonely because society has dismantled most forms of community? Maybe you need to put yourself out there more I guess. It’s gaslighting on a civilizational scale. We’ve built systems that largely prevent human flourishing and then blame individuals for not thriving within them. It’s like poisoning someone’s water supply and then selling them the detox supplements. And the people who see through this shit and try to talk about it openly. They get labeled too intense, unemployable, because their emotional honesty threatens the whole house of cards. We’ve made emotional authenticity a cause of social ostracization. No wonder people are having breakdowns, no wonder mental health crisis rates are skyrocketing, no wonder birth rates are plummeting. We’ve created a civilization that’s hostile to human emotional needs, and we’re surprised that humans are struggling to survive in it. The real miracle isn’t that some people are falling apart, it’s that anyone is managing to stay sane at all.