Am I mad?

None of it is new in terms of things to worry about. There have always been threats and worries.

I've just been watching a lot of old UK TV ads warning about electricity shortages, smog, DC crossing the road, possible nuclear threats and so on.

We're only 6 years out from covid but people seem to have forgotten already just how many things worried about didn't happen and/or didn't need to have the level of worry that was seen in society.

Be too late to worry then! 🤣

Because we are developing a superintelligence that we don’t understand and that organises itself. Alongside that we’ve developed fast, agile, intelligent, programmable robots that could be used as military for a country but equally be used as military against people generally, or even fight itself. The potential just seems to me to be more chaos and more destruction but Mother Nature has the potential to outdo us all.

I suffer with (medically diagnosed) anxiety and honestly I have done my utmost to stop worrying about things I can’t change. I do what I can but I can’t say to Iran, Russia and the US to stop fighting. So I stop thinking about it.

I agree with you OP - Climate Change and AI are terrifying. This summer has been terrifying, and I've just been pottering in my garden and worrying about insignificant little things.
I think it's so huge, that people have no choice but to block it out and hope that "someone will do something" in time.
The race to AI super-intelligence is similar to race to get the A-bomb. Everyone's racing to get it, because otherwise the other side will get it first. The ex-CEO of one of them says there's a high probability that AI super intelligence will spell the end of the human race. At this point I decided to stop listening to podcasts about AI.

No OP, yanbu.

Get rid of the telly and stop reading newspapers. Help your kids, help animals. Leave twats to continue being twats. Doing these things is preserving the small amount of sanity I have left.

The only thing I'm suprised about is that we haven't already wiped ourselves out.
I'll worry about it if (when) it happens.

I completely agree, it’s madness that people are sharing the videos of those robots falling over and running so fast like it’s hilarious when I think the consequences are actually terrifying, it’s like watching an episode of Black Mirror play out in real life before our eyes.

Who would have thought that repeatedly voting in people who have a vested interest in making money from selling oil could have ended up here ?

And now we are here, why are we (present company excluded) still voting them in ?

I don’t watch the news, just skim headlines. AI and the climate crisis is so way out of my control that I try not to give it all too much headspace.

I’m GenX and spent a good part of the 1980s convinced we were all going to die in a nuclear war, so did not put any serious effort in to finding a career as assumed would be dead anyway. I’m not taking that attitude again, but am going to enjoy myself, with an eye to the fact that we don’t know what is going to happen in the next few years, so enjoy yourself and try to make sensible decisions in the meantime for yourself (i.e. if you’re buying a new house think of the potential impact of flood or fires).

Me too. My mental health is so much better now I don't read all this stuff.

I used to be very politically and socially engaged. Sat on medical ethics boards, was a member of a political party, went to the conferences and doorstepped during campaigns. Read The Times/Telegraph/Guardian/FT every day.

I don't do any of it now because I realised that it made no fucking difference and the world was going to do its thing whatever I did.

I now glance at the headlines occasionally, do not engage with social media, and have mastered the art of not giving a fuck.

I'm much happier for it.

What's the point?

I can't do anything about it. Climate change is happening. It'll take the will of all the billionaires and all the governments in the world to minimise the impact of it at this point, and they don't want to.

I'll do what I can, I recycle, I cycle to work, I go on holiday abroad once every two years. I vote labour, because they seem to have the only sensible green policies in this country. But honestly, it's pointless.

I'm not going to quit my job and spend my life protesting, because it won't do anything. Even Greta Thunburg has realised she was shouting into the void and has pivoted to a different cause.

So what's the point in worrying about it? Yes, at some point me and everyone I love may die in a fiery hellscape. But I can't do anything about it, so why ruin the years I do have stressing about it?

Stop watching the news.

I have no concerns at all the only thing we can do is look out for our selves.

My other weirdly comforting thought when I’ve read or listened to another apocalyptically gloomy summary of the next decade, is if it takes everyone out that will include all the truly horrendous people who are hell bent on torture and chaos and that can only be a good thing. If we’re going down we’re ALL going down.

@ShitHoleDweller “There ain’t nothing good coming over the hill so you may as well enjoy today.”

So true!!

Unless you plan on shuffling off within the next three years you will be experiencing it.

There are swathes of people who do not read the news and I expect are massively more happy than the people who do. There ain’t nothing good coming over the hill so you may as well enjoy today.

It all makes me glad I'm old and will hopefully have shuffled off before it gets too awful.

This is right. We know more about the tragedies of strangers on the other side of the world in real time than people in world wars knew of what was happening to their sons and daughters months later. It's too much for a basic human brain and flips into apathy/overload.

The Government is not quietly solving the climate crisis! There are bits and pieces but they're slow moving and often then undermined by another part of govt or economic reality.

And AI threats are real, probably already unstoppable by even those who control the systems and our govt is responding by agreeing to data centre infrastructure (growth obsession) which will knock out climate goals.

I work closely to some of this stuff and I do despair. My only response is to try and take care of my own patch and be decent to others.

Many of these things need to be tackled on a global level and we don’t have a global government. Most countries have a government which is either only in for a fixed term so are concentrated on short term successes or a government which is in indefinitely which is usually a dictatorship.
We, as individuals, can attempt to get into parliament to try to influence things, we can take direct or indirect action to have our voices heard or we can accept that we can do very little on the global scale.My choice is to do what I can to reduce my own impact on the environment and to give back where I can to the local community.

I also think physiologically we simply can’t take all this variety of information in and do what we’d naturally expect to do when there’s crises, react with emotion. We didn’t evolve to have this much information flung at us daily.

I only read news when I know that I’m reading as an observer with interest, simply to be aware of what’s going on in the world but not if I start to feel I’m personally responsible. I can recycle and buy ethically and donate to things but at the end of the day, changes have to happen at a higher corporate and political level. Which is why it’s important to be aware of the news and world issues in order to vote or effect changes at the lower smaller level I can do.

How would people have felt in 1930s / 1940s with the slide into war then a very long recovery?
Sure you just hope for the best and keep muddling on.

I think psychologically, we are not equipped to manage risk on this scale that we cannot do anything about so we are driven to minimise and ignore it as a protective mechanism. We are genetically programmed to be optimistic because otherwise, given that the odds of the earliest human beings surviving were so low, people would have just given up. Over millions of years, the most positive and resilient would have survived, and now, the optimism gene is biting us on the bottom.