Am I mad?

[EmberR]

I am not sure if I am going mad or the world is going mad. But if you read the news properly you see the climate change crisis severely impacting many people with disaster in Nepal, effects of the summer heatwaves in Europe threatening food and water stability and no sense that carbon emissions are being reduced to manage this ongoing threat. You read that all major technology firms and leaders are stating openly that AI is becoming a significant threat to our security. With no sense that any governing body is managing this ongoing threat. You read that Russia, Iran, UK, USA etc are all playing very dangerous war games and we are likely ro
be targeted in a form of retaliation and we need to prepare. With no sense that and governing body is managing this ongoing threat.

so what are we meant to feel? Fine? Just carry on with our lives? Honestly I can’t understand how this level of threat is being reported alongside headings about Harry and Meghan and Reading festival updates.

Anyone else feel like this is a very very odd time and unsure what to do?

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

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.

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

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

So true!!

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.

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

Stop watching the news.

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?

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.

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

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Be too late to worry then! 🤣

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.