You might appreciate Julia Wise's finding equilibrium in a difficult time. The post was about how to relate to the world at the start of covid (notably, a global pandemic that >99% of people survived, despite large human costs to both lives and livelihoods). But it can apply just as easily to AI doom fears.
 

This is a historic event. I find it kind of comforting to know that other people have been through similar historic events. Other people throughout the centuries have experienced epidemics and have worried, argued about what to do, and done their best to take care of each other.

C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948:

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

"In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

"This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."

(emphasis mine)

Perhaps it would be useful to talk to someone alive in 1960 about how they carried about their lives under the constant threat of nuclear war? 

Nor can I speak to any of my friends or family about it, because they think the whole thing is ridiculous, and I’ve put myself in something of a boy who cried wolf situation by getting myself worked up over a whole host of worst-case scenarios over the years.

This seems important to me, having people to talk to.

How about sharing that you have uncertainty and aren't sure how to think about it, or something like that? Seems different from "hey everyone, we're definitely going to die this time" and also seems true to your current state (as I understand it from this post)

Hi bethhw!

Thanks for taking the time to write up this post. Many of us have gone through similar things and can relate to the struggle you are experiencing.

Regarding the "I can't do anything about it" part: 

1. I see this meme a lot in the AI safety community. I think it's a function of a) the underlying complexity of the problem and b) the reverance we have for some of the people working on this, with a dash of c) "my academic background is completely irrelevant" and d) "it's too late for me to build the skills I need to contribute" thrown in there.
2. I won't argue against a) and b) - the problem IS hard and the people working on it ARE often very impressive with regards to their intellectual chops.
3. But c) and d) are a completely different story, and I want to push back hard against them. People routinely underestimate how many different skills a given field can benefit from. AI Safety needs cognitive scientists, STEM people, historians, activists, political scientists, artists, journalists, content editors, Office Managers, educators, finance specialists, PAs- if you truly think your background is irrelevant, send me a DM and I'm happy to take bets on whether I can find a position that would benefit from your skillset. ;-) 
   (Anecdotally, I used to be a teacher, and I'm now working on case studies for AI Standards, field-building and Research Management. It turned out people really appreciate it when you can explain something in clear terms, organize processes well and help others to engage with important but thorny ideas.)

On building skills: The field is so young and nascent that literally nobody is "on the ball" and while this is deeply concerning from an x-risk perspective, it is good news for you - there is a limited number of key concepts and models to understand. For many people, it's is not too late to learn about these things and to build skills, and there are many resources and programs to support this.

Last but not least: Reach out to me if you'd like to discuss your options or just want to talk to a kind voice. I'd be happy to. :)

I just wanted to thank everyone who commented for your thoughtful responses. They really helped me think through this issue a bit more. I really appreciate this community and will definitely be sticking around!

At this point, I have no idea what to believe. I don’t know if this is the case of the doomiest voices being the loudest, while the world is actually populated with academics, programmers and researchers who form the silent, unconcerned majority - or whether we genuinely are all screwed.

My sense is that this is broadly true, at least in the sense of 'unconcerned' meaning 'have a credence in AI doom of max 10% and often lower'. All the programmers and academics working on AI presumably don't think they're accelerating or enabling the apocalypse, otherwise they could stop - these are highly skilled software engineers who would have no trouble finding a new job. 

Also, every coder in the world knows that programs often don't do what you think they're going to do, and that as much as possible you have to break them into components and check rigorously in lab conditions how they behave before putting them in the wild. Of course there are bugs that get through in every program, and of course there are ways that this whole picture could be wrong. Nonetheless, it gives me a much more optimistic sense of 'number of people (implicitly) working on AI safety' than many people in the EA movement seem to have.

Unfortunately, I do not have time for a long answer, but I can understand very well how you feel. Stuff that I find helpful is practising mindfulness and/or stoicism and taking breaks from internet. You said that you find it difficult to make future plans. In my experience, it can calm you down to focus on your career / family / retirement even if it is possible that AI timelines are short. If it turns out that fear of AI is the same as fear of grey goo in the 90s, making future plans is better anyway.

You may find this list of mental health suggestions helpful:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLLeGA7aGaJpgCkof/mental-health-and-the-alignment-problem-a-compilation-of

Be not afraid to seek help if you get serious mental health issues.

My answer might be useless, but I somewhat went through the same. Purely from my side, after a week it was gone, as I was just temporarily overwhelmed. 

I also hold the opinion that Eliezer Yudkowsky might be doing important work (I am not educated enough to know what that valuable work is), but I think he should stop being anywhere near a spotlight. He might seem like one of the key people within EA, he certainly did seem to me when I discovered EA, but he is awful at PR. There are loads of skeptics around, and he is not the only one to represent the EA.

On the other hand maybe EY is a blessing in disguise because he creates so much fear, and actually helps the AI safety area. I don't think there is any harm done in exploring that area after all!

However, also bear in mind that even the “senior” EAs, are still people and their opinions might mean nothing. As an example Will MacAskill expressed this "I think existential risk this century is much lower than I used to think — I used to put total risk this century at something like 20%; now I’d put it at less than 1%" https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oPGJrqohDqT8GZieA/ask-me-anything?commentId=HcRNG4yhB4RsDtYit. Well thanks a lot Will, because that fear of a 20% chance of death almost forced me into changing a career, which would have been useless now, and I don't think Will would do anything to help me fix such a mistake once I would switch.

I think this is an extremely good post laying out why the public discussion on this topic might seem confusing:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BTcEzXYoDrWzkLLrQ/the-public-debate-about-ai-is-confusing-for-the-general

It might be somewhat hard to follow, but this little prediction market is interesting (wouldn't take the numbers too seriously):

In December of last year it seemed plausible to many people online that by now, August 2023, the world would be a very strange, near-apocalyptic place full of inscrutable alien intelligences. Obviously, this is totally wrong. So it could be worth comparing others' "vibes" here to your own thought process to see if you're overestimating the rate of progress.

Paying for GPT-4 if you have the budget may also be helpful to calibrate. It's magical, but you run into embarrassing failures pretty quickly, which most commentators tend to talk about rarely.