Ask HN: How do you cope with the existential dread of AGI?
Im going to assume you aren&#x27;t a troll, and this isn&#x27;t a standard GPT generated doom post.<p>First, is nobody understands what AGI. You don&#x27;t understand it. Most people on HN don&#x27;t understand it.  Even Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn&#x27;t seem to quite get it.<p>People seem to extrapolate current progress with LLMS to something that is so intelligent that it can figure out how break out take over the world. Its all romantic science fiction narratives, without any real basis.<p>The explanation of how hard AGI is to achieve is actually really simple. Lets assume that we have an AGI that is capable of taking over the world and subduing all humans, and even more so, lets say it has full access to the internet and it has been pretrained on everything on the internet. To achieve its goal, it needs to be able to have control of a highly chaotic system that is the human population operating in reality, where its own actions cause the system to change drastically. In turn, for control, it has to have one of 2 things.<p>1. some sort of simulation system that is a representation of reality that is not only accurate enough, but can also be ran at a rate faster than reality, and in parallel. Oh and it also needs the initial state of that simulation, which by definition has to include the configuration of the neural network synapses in the human brain times the number of people it deems necessary to complete its objective. Let me know when we terraform mars with a bunch of nuclear powerplants and entire surface covered with TPUs to run a second earth simulation through evolution from primitive lifeforms to humans, and maybe this will be possible.<p>2. Somehow generate a mathematical formula for reality, thus proving P=NP as a side product.<p>I hopefully shouldn&#x27;t have to explain how unlikely either are.<p>As for all the weak AIs, they will only make society better because for every AI that can do something, you can build an equivalent AI to counter it, and the things that will be left over are those that generate a net good.<p>Secondly, (and I only say this because I have met quite a few people like you to say that this isn&#x27;t an uncommon phenomenon, notably my wife who almost failed out of her graduate program because Trump news was making her depressed) is that you have an psychological issue where your internal reward loop is based around being aware of [insert bad news here] and the more strongly you associate with it and concern yourself with it, the better&#x2F;more connected you feel to people.<p>Except that the people around you aren&#x27;t actually around you, they are just randos on the internet who don&#x27;t give a fuck about you.  And you aren&#x27;t doing anything good by being &quot;concerned&quot; with the bad news, because you aren&#x27;t actually concerned. To be concerned about something results in actions that you take, but I bet you aren&#x27;t doing anything to actually address the problem that you see. All you are doing in being &quot;concerned&quot; is essentially woke signaling to others in hopes of gaining sympathy and thus feeling accepted.<p>Once you realize that you have this issue, and work to fix it, your life will become much better.