Comment by ogrok on Engaging Seriously with Short Timelines · 2020-07-29T21:27:27.813Z · LW · GW

You have detailed perhaps the more productive side of the advice—what to do—and I have consequently thought of some quick bullets on what not to do.

1. Getting into a career likely to be made obsolete is bad. This will either be most of them—in which case it is prudent to distill productive activities to a very small list not unlike the one you write above—or it will be a more workable subset. Either way, much of copywriting, rudimentary coding activities for basic websites, etc. are likely to disappear, and one should either become an expert in a very specific type of these things, or avoid them; there won't be much economic advantage for someone whose body of work is the corpus for GPT-4, etc.!

2. Paralyzing pessimism or indifference. Even if we are racing toward a singularity, inaction is worse than action, and for mental health it is very important to stay active. Not everyone should take this as "go get a job in AI research" but it might be a good time to read over 80,000 Hours to make sure your direction in life is deliberate and robust enough to fulfill you into an uncertain future.