How do AI timelines affect how you live your life?

I asked out my crushes. Worked out well for me.

I used to be really inhibited, now I have tried weed, alcohol and am really enjoying the moment.

I used to be an early-retirement fanatic, which I half-jokingly called "effective egotism". I took enormous quality of life hits to maximize my savings rate, which was extremely high - I now spend my money more. I also took some time off during COVID and found not-working doesn't suit me (this is probably something I should have done before devoting my twenties to early retirement) so I'll probably remain a professional programmer until I'm obsolete or a paperclip.

I try to help with alignment where I can, purchasing ads for AI-risk podcasts, occasionally got a charismatic alignment-pilled person I know on mildly-popular podcasts as an attempt to raise AI-risk awareness, but given timelines I do think these efforts are slightly more pathetic than I did last year.  I used to organize meetups with Altman every year, but my timelines going down to 5-10 years makes me less enthusiastic about OpenAI's behavior, and is one of the reasons I stopped. 

In terms of things that will happen before full AGI,  I started writing short stories occasionally (the models starting to understand humor was quite an update) as I think human writers will be obsolete very soon, so now's the time to produce old-fashioned art while it still has a chance of being worth reading to some people. 

I regret that I did not become an expert in AI and cannot contribute directly to alignment, but then again I'm not very high-g so I doubt I would have succeeded even if I tried my very hardest. 

As an aside, if anyone is reading this and is a talented developer, https://www.conjecture.dev/ are hiring. (Edit, guess they are not still hiring) I've interacted enough with the people involved to know they are sincerely trying to tackle the problem while avoiding safety washing and navel gazing.

Even if you think the odds are low, "going out fighting" doesn't look like a miserable trek. It looks like joining a cool startup in London (getting a visa is pretty seamless), with very bright people, who share much of your worldview and love programming. It looks like being among "your people" working on very important problems for a historically astounding salary.  If you're lucky enough to be able to join such a fight, consider it may be an enjoyable one!

If I had the brains/chops to contribute that's where I would want to be working right now.  

I've recently started looking at AIS and I'm trying to figure out how I would like to contribute to the field. My sole motivation is that all timelines see either my kids or grandkids dying from AGI. I want them to die of old age after having lived a decent life.

I get the sense that motivation ranks as quite selfish, but it's a powerful one for me. If working on AIS is the one best thing I can do for their current and future wellbeing, then I'll do that.

I don't think about it too much. It's not a very useful thing to spend mental energy on. Alignment either gets solved or we die, and there's little benefit to personally preparing for either possibility, beyond having a broad index fund to hedge against the unlikely outcome where (1) alignment is solved, (2) there's little to no UBI, (3) stock investments still provide returns, and (4) money is actually useful for me.

I'm an optimist myself (~94% odds of an okay outcome, IMO), but whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, short timelines have little immediate consequence other than reducing the expected value of long-term future preparation, beyond those orientated towards solving alignment.

I worry less about retirement savings (I'm in my twenties), and long term financial investment in general. I worry somewhat less about getting my parents signed up for cryonics (they're in their late fifties). 

I'm transferring from particle physics to alignment. This is motivated by altruistic reasons, but also by not wanting me and my social circle to die.

As of 2022 the fire alarm is ringing. I think there is a decent chance I will be dead in ten years. Whatever I want to do I need to do it soon. It has been very motivational:

-- Restored my relationship of ~10 years (we broke up in 2021 and got back together in 2022)

-- Actually learned to work on crypto apps. Wrote some cool code. Previously I just did crypto finance. I've always thought crypto was sweet and wanted to contribute but didn't push myself to start writing dapp code.

-- Started ramping up animal activism (animals matter in the future. If I only have so many choices left I want to choose love)

-- Been more generous in my donations

More prosacially I've been investing in 'ai companies broadly construed'.

Well, I think we're all dead soon, so no point in cryonics, retirement planning, etc. Live for today, sod around in the sunshine while you still can.

Not caring about long-term political issues is quite relaxing! 

A lot depends on how much uncertainty you have over that timeline, and how you expect the uncertainty to change as time passes.  If it's 10-200 years, with a peak at 20, you probably shouldn't do anything particularly weird in response, except keeping a close eye on 5-10 year strong indicators, at which point you flip your savings/investment mechanisms from long-term optimization to short/medium-term utility maximization.

Probably not as much as it should.

People remain surprisingly passive when faced with the prospect of death. Fear of public ridicule or losing one's livelihood is more likely to drive men to extremes and the breaking of their customary habits.

− http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/92

It does make me quite anxious. I had already been anxious about it and now I'm maybe 30% more anxious than I had been.

My overall plan is to work my 9-5, make money, retire early, and then try to do something useful in AIS. I thought about forgetting the make money and retire early part due to the shorter timelines. But for whatever reason that sort of thing would make me anxious. I'd feel better knowing that I have the nest egg, so that seems like a good enough reason to pursue it. Plus I finally have a job that I enjoy, and I've been thinking that there might be some wisdom in what people were talking about in this thread [LW · GW] regarding the sort of grounding that a normal job provides.

I've been a little bit more liberal with spending money on fun things. I'm planning a trip to Thailand right now that I've always wanted to take and never got around to before. I think the shorter timelines has influenced that somewhat, but not too significantly.

I don't think much about long-term health stuff, a la Peter Attia. I've always gone back and forth about being a health nut, but now I feel confident that being a health nut is not worth it. I've even pushed things in the direction of not caring about eating unhealthy food, but I'm finding that eating too much unhealthy stuff isn't worth it due to the short-term impact of how it makes me feel alone, physically and cognitively.

This one is probably unique to me, but I stopped caring about the risk of death due to things like Covid and cars. Previously I cared about that risk due to my having assigned [LW · GW] a very high expected value to life, but that expected value has since gone down. Although given how things have developed with new variants being more mild and such, I probably wouldn't be caring much about Covid anyway right now. Similar with the possibility of nuclear war.

Updates

I went to the dentist today. I have problems with teeth grinding that seem like they'll cause TMJ and enamel erosion down the road (and have already started to). I could get a mouth guard. But mouth guards are uncomfortable for me to wear. So I have to weigh that discomfort against the down the road problems. The short timelines probably move me from "get the mouth guard" to "don't get the mouth guard" here.

I had been spending time learning functional programming with Haskell and Clojure. I'd like to continue that -- it's fun and will be helpful to me in the long run -- but now I feel like I don't really have time for it and need to spend my time on higher priority things. Whereas previously I guess I figured that there's time to get to the higher priority things down the road. Maybe this push towards focusing on higher priority things isn't a bad thing. Maybe it is.

I've always been very afraid of intimacy and extremely reclusive, even quasi-agoraphobic. For those who know the terms "NEET" and "hikikomori", they describe me pretty well. But the possibility that I will not live to be forty years old has been weighing on me more and more - in fact I've had the weird, unfounded fear that I would die young literally my entire life, which I mostly shoved in the back of my mind - and I am considering trying to find some way to escape the rut I've been in since my teenage years, leave my parents' house, and... have real life experiences, before the world changes beyond my ability to predict.

Have I actually done so yet?

...no.

I decreased my contribution to my 401k, as that's money I can't touch for almost four decades, and increased my near-term investments.

A number of answers have already alluded to deprioritizing long-term savings, but you could go farther and borrow from the post-singularity future. Get a mortgage or other loan. This may work out well even in some worlds with friendly superintelligence, because maybe the AGI gives us a luxury automated communism and your debt obligation is somehow disolved.

Umm... this is not financial advice.

Byyyye!

It did wonders for my mental health. This might be a psychological quirk of mine but I find it so much more satisfying that we all go together with a bang rather than by slow decay and mediocrity. It satisfies my need for drama and heroism. I suppose that's part of why doomsday cults have been so popular through the ages. 

I attended my high school reunion recently. So many people worrying about things that didn't matter, living without purpose, living in the past etc.

I used to worry about death by old age, slow decay, meaningless etc. I do a lot less of that now. I don't think AI timelines were the primary catalyst of that - age & wisdom surely count too- but all-in-all it has made more motivated, more sure of myself and my path, less pre-occupied with little things that don't matter. 

I will post my favourite poem to describe how I feel: 

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I will not go gentle into that cold night.

I’ll be seventy later this year so I don’t worry about “the future” for myself much or how I should live my life differently. I’ve got some grandkids though and as far as my advice to them goes I tell their mom that the trades will be safer than clerical or white color jobs because robotics will lag behind AI. Sure you can teach an AI to do manual labor, like say brain surgery, but it’s not going to be making house calls. Creating a robotic plumber would be a massive investment and so not likely to happen. In my humble opinion.

Of course this assumes the world will still need plumbers in the near future. Personally I expect the world to still need plumbers and other tradespeople in the next twenty-plus years. Even if construction was cut back due to its 40% contribution to greenhouse gases there will still be homes that need maintenance.

My son is a tradesperson as is my son-in-law so I have some knowledge of that lifestyle.

I also know a bit about AI despite my age as I retired after a thirty year IT career including being a developer, software development team manager and the VP of Operations in a fifty person print and online textbook publishing company. Since retiring for the past three years I’ve been writing hard science fiction novellas and short stories about AI and Social Robots in the near future. About two thousand pages consisting of seven novellas and forty short stories so far. Hard science fiction requires a ton of research and thinking and I try to write every day. 

I finished my first novella in August of 2020, a few months before Brian Christian published his book, “The Alignment Problem” and the term and issue became popularized. My own belief about AI timelines is that the adoption rate is going to be the fastest ever. See https://hbr.org/2013/11/the-pace-of-technology-adoption-is-speeding-up for technology adoption rates. AI will teach itself how to get smarter and AGI will arrive in just a few years.

Will we solve the “The Alignment Problem” before then? No – because the science of human values will turn out to be perhaps the most challenging technical work AI researchers ever face. What are values? What are they made of? How do they “work” technically? Did you mean genetically inherited values or learned values? Are they genes? If so how would we account for the effect of epigenetics on values as suggested by twin studies? Or are they neurological structures like some form of memory? How do they communicate with each other and change? Is each value made up of sub-values? How would you construct a Bayesian Network to emulate a human values system? Is there a better way? And so on. The science of human values is in its infancy so we are not going to solve the alignment problem any time soon. Unless of course… AI solves it for us. And wouldn't that be an interesting scenario. Does this mean we’re all gonna be killed by AI? As any Master of Futures Studies program faculty member will tell you, it is impossible to predict the future.

Do I think these issues will effect my grandkids? Absolutely. Can I imagine their world? Not a chance. When I was twenty the personal computer, the internet and cell phones didn’t exist. My future career didn’t exist. So I don’t have much more advice for my grandkids other than the robotics/trades angle.

What would I do differently if I was twenty-something now? Well if I didn’t go into the trades I’d plan on working for any kind of company involved in the environment in any way. Unlike in my novella series where the World Governments Federation mandates population control in the real world people will continue to have babies and for the next thirty or forty years the global population will continue to grow. Then there are things like climate change, refugees and war etc. The environment will struggle to deal with all that and need a lot of hands on deck.

Now you might be thinking there’s more to life than a career. I agree. I write not to get published but as an act of self-expression, something I consider the highest calling of life. If you know what you get the greatest personal gratification from I recommend you find a way to make time for it.

I think about my young daughters' lives a lot. One says she wants to be an artist. Another a teacher.

Do those careers make any sense on a timeframe of the next 20 years?

What interests and careers do I encourage in them that will become useless at the slowest rate?

I think about this a lot - and then I mainly do nothing about it, and just encourage them to pursue whatever they like anyway.

Dropping my plans of earning to give, which only really made sense before the recent flood of funding and the compression of timelines.

Increasing the amount of study I'm doing in Alignment and adjacent safety spaces. I have low confident I'll be able to help in any meaningful fashion given my native abilities and timelines, but not trying seems both foolish and psychologically damaging.

Reconsidering my plans to have children - it's more likely I'll spend time and resources on children already existing (or planned) inside my circle of caring. 

Guess I'm the only one with the exact opposite fear, expecting society to collapse back into barbarism. 
As IQ rates continue to decline, the most invincible force in the universe is human stupidity. It has a kind of implacable brutality that conquers everything.
I expect a grim future as the civilized countries decline to Third World status, with global mass starvation.