Slightly over year ago, I was a "normie" brand new to EA, and focused on life, events, family, friends, and scrolling Instagram or TikTok for things that inspired or entertained me. I was firmly in the box of American normality. I could call a friend to discuss an upcoming event, a celebrity, blockbuster movie, dating, someone's new promotion, job, or baby, and nothing felt worrisome or existential. A year ago, I was safe, content and comfortable in my American bubble. (Yes, I have a deeper understanding of my biases and beliefs today.)
Yet, I was studying AI safety, new to EA, and looking at the world, its history, and the story of humanity. Honestly, in a lens I had not thought of in such depth before. My bubble of comfort and content did not pop all at once. It was a slow rabbit hole that thinned the walls day by day as I kept reading and studying. Until one day, I noticed the conversations I used to love having with friends and family had less meaning.
I tried to find the words for what had changed and to share it with the people I love but it came out sounding like a sci-fi script or a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was new to AI safety, so my words were streams of consciousness, shaped by whatever paper or Substack I had been reading or that had assisted in forming my opinions. I would watch my words land in real time on the faces of my friends and loved ones. Then the slight shift in someone's face from interest to concern, to this cannot possible be true, and then to fear for me because what I was describing was too farfetched to be real. So I would soften my words, or change the subject, or say something vague but true about AI that matched the narrative they were already hearing from TV pundits or politicians. I would casually offer an interesting theory about AI's capabilities, something a person could digest and feel smarter for knowing. Over time, my guilt increased, because I told myself I was preserving something, but in reality I was adding to the problem. That is one of the things about AI safety that keeps me up at night. And my personal guilt, of how quickly, I retreated to comfort.
My current view, and it may change, is that taking AI (AGI, ASI) timelines seriously produces a specific kind of loneliness that is difficult to name. It is not the loneliness of being disagreed with but of scale mismatch. Of operating on a different clock than the people you love and having no clean way to hand them your view of time and measurement.
Here is how I got there, and I want to credit @Holden Karnofsky 'Most Important Century' series for making the timeline visible to me and more specifically his post "All Possible Views About Humanity's Future are Wild" Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, and if you compress the entire history of the universe into a single calendar year, the format Carl Sagan popularized, Homo sapiens show up at 11:52 pm on December 31st. Agriculture, writing, and every civilization we have a record of, fits inside the last few seconds before midnight. In the abstract, I had some knowledge of this, but I never fully understood or had reason to contemplate this, until I saw it laid out visually. Then something shifted, and it took me a few days to process what I was actually looking at. As a creative, seeing something is how I fully understand it.
Karnofsky's argument gives the next part of the visual with data and numbers. Global economic growth sat below roughly 1% per year for nearly all of recorded human history. Then, starting with the Industrial Revolution, around 300 years ago, growth broke into several percent per year, not a gradual acceleration, but a structural break in the curve. His argument is that AI could restart a version of that break by taking over the more ideas side of the loop that used to depend on population growth. I don't know if he is right about the magnitude or the timeline. But once you look at the actual curve rather than hearing it described, it is hard to dismiss the direction of his claim. (Current events seem to be aligned with his theory.)
What this has done to me personally is harder to argue and just easier to report. I worry less about things that used to occupy space in my head. What people think about a particular decision, I make. Whether a project looks impressive enough before it ships. Which viral news cycle I am supposed to have an opinion about this week. I struggled for days writing this piece because I wanted it to be 'EA Forum' perfect, and then I let that go because wanting it to be perfect, was my old clock ticking. I feel a daily gratitude for the ordinary fact of waking up. No, this isn't Instagram wisdom, but it might just be what happens when your sense of AI timescale gets recalibrated by the numbers instead of by a well-managed life on a timeline handed down for generations.
The loneliness is the cost side of that same recalibration and its impact. It is not that my friends or family are wrong. It is that we are on different reference frames. I spend almost all of my free time, studying AI papers, listening to technical experts, policy signals, reading blogs and engaging with various peers and cohorts. Meanwhile the people I love are planning major life events, European vacations, or summer stays in New England and Martha's Vineyard. Each are completely reasonable ways to spend life. But you can describe the recalibration, and watch someone look back at you with warmth and no recognition, and feel the tension to make them see it. Recently, I read about this phenomenon in relation to what astronauts describe after seeing Earth from orbit. It is called, the overview effect, a profound shift followed almost universally by the same complaint: coming home changed them fundamentally and finding everyone still running on the old frame.
It is well past midnight as I finish this and I know this loneliness is not unique to me, which is why I am posting it here instead of somewhere more comfortable. My guess is that a meaningful number of people in this community (some for over a decade) are carrying some version of the same gap, between what the AI/AGI/ASI timelines seem to imply, and what the daily conversations with the people they love and care about have room to expand.
I don't know if this feeling is a correct read of the moment, or a distortion that comes from reading too many AI safety papers, blogs and more by people, by selection, who are already convinced, that something is coming. I am sitting in the discomfort and close to the uncertainty. Trying to find my words.
I am relatively new to EA, almost one full year, and I want to ask the people who have been navigating this for much longer than I have as a "newbie." Does the gap close or do you just get better at carrying it?
