Ajeya Cotra uses the term “situational awareness” to refer to a cluster of skills including “being able to refer to and make predictions about yourself as distinct from the rest of the world,” “understanding the forces out in the world that shaped you and how the things that happen to you continue to be influenced by outside forces,” “understanding your position in the world relative to other actors who may have power over you,” “understanding how your actions can affect the outside world including other actors,” etc.

Alternatively, from an ML-perspective, situational awareness can be characterized as a strong form of out-of-context meta-learning applied to situationally-relevant statements.