Psychological Support for AI Safety Researchers Is Neglected and Easy to Provide

I think there is a big chunk of relatively low-hanging-fruit-style neglected work useful for AI safety which I can roughly label as “psychological help for AI safety workers”. I didn’t run actual studies, but the amount of anecdotal evidence is big enough for me to claim it is significant and generalizable. I think the utility of this work will increase, perhaps dramatically, as people face more and more pressure due to the upcoming Singularity. Many people operate in war-like conditions and experience war-like stress. This must be managed. Definitions What follows is a working definition of “psychological work”. It includes things like: Literal mental health support and stress management. Providing motivation when the probability of success is very low and the stakes are very high. Keeping people from burning out while maintaining their abnormal levels of productivity optimized for a short time window of human agency. Preventing people from doing harmful things in desperation. Keeping people from doing useless but morally compelling work. Family and relationship work: partners and parents who don't share the timelines, anticipatory grief, how to talk about any of this at dinner. Doing something with the fact that NDA-bound and infohazard-adjacent work can't be discussed with an outside therapist, so the substance of the stress stays sealed. Management of the relationship with the models themselves: people who spend twelve hours a day with agents develop attachments, resentments and parasocial patterns toward the systems they fear, and this is essentially unstudied. This will become more clear when illustrated with examples of the problems it is intended to solve. Current state Three properties of the current mood in the AI safety community that I want to address are stress, defeatism, and business as usual. Stress is more straightforward. It takes the following forms: People burn out because they believe they must act extraordinarily quickly. I think it is rational to plan a burnout for when ASI is created and human labour is obsolete, but it’s obviously very hard to plan it very precisely, both because of the uncertainty in timelines and burnout rates. Hence, many people burn out prematurely. People burn out because the opportunity cost of not prompting agents has skyrocketed and is going up further. For many avenues of AI safety work, every hour of free time is an hour not spent on doing more and more things with the agents. This inevitably leads to fatigue. People are just plainly afraid of dying, and a lot of things happening when they work on AI safety remind them of a high probability of dying soon. People are suffering from guilt over not working hard enough considering the stakes. While that is yet another cause of burnout, the feeling of guilt itself is a stress factor. There are more mundane issues: fellowship-hopping, three-month contracts, grant cliffs, visa dependence. Some are inable to make ordinary life plans because the planning horizon is unknown, which is a chronic stressor distinct from fear of death. Some people hide distress to protect funding and reputation which makes things worse. The second, no less widespread but less explicitly discussed, problem is defeatism in AI safety. It takes the following forms: A belief that the outcome of the Singularity hinges on someone else, someone more capable, the adults in the room; a conviction that real alignment will remain a distant dream until some fundamental breakthroughs are made by others. And so, many people are content with the usual tasks, and innovation is not attempted enough. Related to that, work is viewed merely as a routine job: people work diligently and responsibly, yet lack enthusiasm and question the ultimate value of their efforts. Some ignore short timelines operationally using the following trick: they say that we cannot impact anything if the timelines are short, hence we must focus on futures with longer timelines. Some express a desire to do something heroic and self-sacrificial, or at least very non-trivial. On one hand, this is commendable. On the other, however, it is simply another form of defeatism. People lack confidence in victory and doubt the utility of their present work. All that remains for them is “martial valor” and miracles. The opposite of the previous: a rejection of martial valor; the view that the traditional notion of dignity is not suitable anymore; that fighting to the bitter end is pointless; and that martial valor exists only when witnessed, becoming meaningless if humanity vanishes from the universe. There is a clear systematic inconsistency between many people’s stated beliefs about timelines and p(doom) and their actions. People invent various strategies to ignore their beliefs about timelines. Retreat into meta-work: strategy posts, forecasting, field-building about field-building, in preference to object-level work. Ironically, this post of mine is itself meta-work. And on the opposit