If I were to die right now, I would at least have had a chance to live something like a fulfilling life—but the joy of childhood seems inextricable from a sense of hope for the future.
I don’t agree with this at all. I remember being a happy child and the joy was all about things that were happening in the moment, like reading books and playing games. I didn’t think at all about the future.
Even if my children’s short lives are happy, wouldn’t their happiness be fundamentally false and devoid of meaning?
I think having a happy childhood is just good and nothing about maybe dying later makes it bad.
But now, both as I’m nearing the family-forming stage in my life, and as the AI timeline seems to be coming into sharper focus, I’m finding it emotionally distressing to contemplate having children.
I’m not going to claim that I know what’s in your mind, since I don’t know anything about you. But from the outside, this looks exactly like the same emotional dynamic that seems to be causing a lot of people to say that they don’t want to have kids because of climate change. I agree with you that AI risk is scarier than climate change. But is it more of a reason to not have kids? It seems like this “not having kids” conclusion is a kind of emotional response people have to living in a world that seems scary and out of control, but I don’t think that it makes sense in either case in terms of the interest of the potential kids.
Finally, if you are just hanging out in community spaces online, the emotional sense of “everyone freaking out” is mostly just a feedback loop where everyone starts feeling how everyone else seems to be feeling, not about justified belief updates. Believe what you think is true about AI risk, but if you are just plugging your emotions into that feedback loop uncritically, I think that’s a recipe for both unnecessary suffering and bad decisions. I recommend stepping back if you notice the emotional component influencing you a lot.
I have a toddler, a couple thoughts:
I don’t agree with this at all. I remember being a happy child and the joy was all about things that were happening in the moment, like reading books and playing games. I didn’t think at all about the future.
I think having a happy childhood is just good and nothing about maybe dying later makes it bad.
I’m not going to claim that I know what’s in your mind, since I don’t know anything about you. But from the outside, this looks exactly like the same emotional dynamic that seems to be causing a lot of people to say that they don’t want to have kids because of climate change. I agree with you that AI risk is scarier than climate change. But is it more of a reason to not have kids? It seems like this “not having kids” conclusion is a kind of emotional response people have to living in a world that seems scary and out of control, but I don’t think that it makes sense in either case in terms of the interest of the potential kids.
Finally, if you are just hanging out in community spaces online, the emotional sense of “everyone freaking out” is mostly just a feedback loop where everyone starts feeling how everyone else seems to be feeling, not about justified belief updates. Believe what you think is true about AI risk, but if you are just plugging your emotions into that feedback loop uncritically, I think that’s a recipe for both unnecessary suffering and bad decisions. I recommend stepping back if you notice the emotional component influencing you a lot.