A tough lesson I learned over the past few years is that it’s pretty stressful to work in the “Please Don’t Build the Torment Nexus” ecosystem, especially as it increasingly seems like the world is hell-bent on building the Torment Nexus.
This is what it can feel like to be an impact-pursuing person who stumbles into the AI safety field.
It’s hard to be productive when you’re stressed and anxious. And setting aside productivity, it’s also just plain badif people working on AI safety — My peers! My people! — are feeling distraught.
Anxiety about AI risk really fucking sucks. If you feel this way, you aren’t alone. I’m right by your side, biting my nails, whitening my knuckles.
But even besides me, a lot of people seem to feel this way.
How big of a problem is this?
Survey data[1] described in Spencer Greenberg’s recent 80k episode implies that mental health challenges for people working on AI safety are fairly common:
Most respondents experienced psychological challenges — the median person reported six different problems.
More than half (52%) said these challenges at least moderately hurt their effectiveness, while 45% had considered cutting back or leaving.
The most common problems were:
Difficulty switching off from work: 68%
Imposter syndrome: 60%
Burnout: 59%
Guilt: 56%
Anxiety or worry: 54%
Less common — though still significant — were loneliness or isolation (32%), hopelessness or depression (29%), interpersonal difficulties (28%), and fear of death (22%).
Few appeared to be experiencing clinical anxiety or depressive disorders. The more typical problem was chronic strain: people remained functional, but struggled to rest, sustain motivation, and maintain boundaries.
Somewhat ironically, I asked Fable 5 to estimateBOTEC how much productivity is being lost due to mental health challenges in the AI safety ecosystem. It estimated a loss of roughly 6–7% of total workforce output, with an 80% confidence interval of ~3 to 13%. I only quickly skimmed the report it put together, but the conclusion seems fairly reasonable to me. If anything, my all-things-considered guess is that the real productivity hit is larger.
If I’m right, this seems like a big problem. And as a corollary, if tractable interventions exist here, even modest improvements would be worth a lot.[2]
What is being done about it?
There’s a bunch of existing stuff I’m aware of related to mental health and AI safety:
There’s a ton of writing about mental health challenges related to AI safety on the EA Forum and LessWrong (this post in particular seems like a useful snapshot, though note it’s from 2023; also, see this).
Spencer talks about his book. I haven’t (yet) read it, but maybe it’s good!
What else should be done about it on the margin?
Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not sure how tractable this is, and I don’t claim to have particularly great ideas. With this post, I’m mostly just trying to point at a problem, say “oh man, this seems like a big problem”, and hope that others have ideas for how to fix it.[3]
That said, here are a few things that might be good:
A vetted network of therapists who “get it”. I think it would be good if there was a curated, actively maintained, network of clinicians who have experience working with AI safety clients. As mentioned above, there’s the EA Mental Health Navigator — and ACX has the Psychiat-List — but maybe more can be done? When I was searching for a therapist, I didn’t find these existing resources super helpful.
Better norms in the community. The survey implies that chronic strain (e.g., issues with boundaries, rest, and motivation) is more common than clinical disorders like anxiety or depression. So maybe a lot of the fix has to do with improving the norms that shape the day-to-day experience of working on AI safety. For instance, not socially rewarding hardcoreness as a virtue so strongly.
Expand the group-program model. Rethink Wellbeing’s peer-guided CBT/IFS groups seem useful, at first glance. Maybe someone could do an AI-safety-specific version?
Generous mental health benefits at AI safety orgs. My sense is that many AI safety orgs are good at providing mental health benefits for their employees, but I might be wrong. If the org you run doesn’t offer this, you probably should fix that.
Peer support circles. Lightly facilitated, informal-ish groups of people working on AI safety who meet on some regular cadence to support each other emotionally.
Manager upskilling. Maybe someone (a high-AI-safety-context therapist?) could create resources or offer training sessions on how managers can provide better support to their direct reports.
If you’re interested in starting a project on something like this (or something else aimed at improving mental health in the AI safety space), this RFP from Coefficient Giving might be a good place to get funding. You also might want to check out the EA infrastructure fund.
If you’re applying for funding for some other project/org, consider requesting additional funding specifically to support yourself/your employees with mental health related challenges.
The survey is of 80 people working on existential risk, AI safety, animal welfare, and other high-impact causes. There’s obviously some self-selection bias here, but even after accounting for that, the rates of mental health challenges seem quite high to me. And while the survey population is broader than AI safety specifically, I'm assuming the AI safety subset looks similar (if anything, plausibly worse), but I haven't checked.
The AI safety ecosystem has a high willingness-to-pay for interventions that bring new people into the field. In theory, the willingness-to-pay for interventions that help AI safety people who are struggling with mental health challenges (and are thus less productive than they otherwise could be) should also be high.
After doing some fake math, I'd guess that the ecosystem should be willing to pay at least millions of dollars (maybe tens of millions?!) for something that reduces the productivity drag by a percentage point.
It estimated a loss of roughly 6–7% of total workforce output
I think one issue with this claim is that I think stress and anxiety is downstream of something that also causes a huge amount of upside and that is people are persuaded by this being an incredibly high-impact opportunity. This is high impact because the stakes are high. Things could go catastrophically wrong. Not enough people are working on it. This causes people to make big career pivots and work hard, and also create stress and anxiety with the resulting psychological downsides.
Of course we should try to maintain motivation and interest in the cause area while reducing stress, anxiety, burnout, etc. But I think one of the reasons this is tough is that they are both downstream of a third factor.
Despite this, I do agree with most of your proposed solutions.
Also this is not me saying this is not a big problem. And of course there are other reasons why we should tackle this, not just for the instrumental value of lost productivity.
was just part of PDKU and now back in Philly for my "normal job". I think this is important!
The problems in the bay (and maybe dc) and elsewhere seem very different. I think in the bay, there is enough critical mass that you could do e.g. sports league teams for the AI safety people. Exercise + social is good. Not sure if like constellation is already doing stuff like this, but maybe just pre pay for some different sports leagues and then distribute out flyers with easy signup to the various orgs and email some people. might punt a few k but would probably very little effort and decent upside. I played soccer with some AIS folks at a park and that was fun. I know I would always appreciate someone coming up to me and asking if I wanted to play on a sport team with like minded people for the next 10 weeks.
Outside the bay, idk man. If you can help start an IRL group for people looking to inform the public/gov or help organize existing EA/Rat group to do the same, that seems like a good way to channel the energy. But otherwise it's a bit crazymaking to even think about AIS at all because you will find so little support or understanding from everyone around you. The best thing you can probably do without going nuts is to set a reminder to call your senator and congress person once a month or two and otherwise delete twitter and don't think about it too much (unless you are working an actual AIS remote job, then idk).
In general I suppose I should have always felt the sadness associated with how bad the world is at triaging resources, that is sort of what EA is all about after all, but trying to help with AIS has made me feel this in such a visceral way that doesn't make me feel good compared to the animal welfare/poverty stuff. Maybe I had already more successfully compartmentalized those.
I rejoice in the goodness of those working on AI Safety. As it goes for big problems, they're basically out of control (for a particular agent) and some acceptance around that is needed. Making big tech slow down or put effective guardrails on AI is a difficult task, but those trying for it to be done must be happy about those intentions and efforts (if only they slow down to reflect on them), even if those intentions don't flourish completely.
If I may add, on a deeper level, a lot of stress around x-risk comes from the understanding that such a thing as non-existence is even possible. I think that some relfection on that is also helpful.
Thank you for outlining the opportunities to get funding for mental health projects for those involved, I would love to help with my meditation and mediation facilitation experience.
BLUF:
* To determine whether AI is ‘improving exponentially’, ‘hitting the wall’, or any other claim which involves a quantity or magnitude (e.g. ‘This model was a big leap/small increment’). We need a good y-axis: an interval scale of AI capability which means +1 unit always represents the same degree of ‘how much better’, in the same way +1 degree Celsius is always the same amount of ‘how much hotter’.
* Yet there is no good y-axis for AI capability. All our...
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I think one issue with this claim is that I think stress and anxiety is downstream of something that also causes a huge amount of upside and that is people are persuaded by this being an incredibly high-impact opportunity. This is high impact because the stakes are high. Things could go catastrophically wrong. Not enough people are working on it. This causes people to make big career pivots and work hard, and also create stress and anxiety with the resulting psychological downsides.
Of course we should try to maintain motivation and interest in the cause area while reducing stress, anxiety, burnout, etc. But I think one of the reasons this is tough is that they are both downstream of a third factor.
Despite this, I do agree with most of your proposed solutions.
Also this is not me saying this is not a big problem. And of course there are other reasons why we should tackle this, not just for the instrumental value of lost productivity.