I lied to myself.
For many years I used to believe that the state of the world doesn’t affect me. That I was able to sit back, watch and analyse what happened around me. Be the rational observer I so desperately imagined myself as.
I was wrong. So, so wrong.
Coincidentally, when I thought these things wouldn’t affect me, I also just didn’t pay much attention to them. For many years I was too focused on my own shit to bother a lot with the grand questions and politics in particular. It was a better time.
I’m not sure when exactly my re-awakening started, but I’m fairly sure that the 7th October terror attacks and subsequent debates had a lot to do with it. Many times I felt I was going insane, because I appeared to be one of the very few among my friends who didn’t look for excuses or justifications of why this atrocity took place.
And suddenly the urge to speak up again emerged. To dive once again deeper into politics, global security issues, political philosophy, socio-economic systems and the future of humanity.
Today, I wished I hadn’t done it.
I’m fairly sure that the rapid decline of my mental health in the past one and a half years was largely influenced by this decision.
I read articles, essays, papers, books – whatever I could find to get a better understanding of what and why it was happening.
I got addicted to doomscrolling and reading other people’s thoughts about current geopolitical issues. And when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the American people decided for the second time to put a clown inside the White House. And pretty much everything that I predicted in my essay after the election turned out to be true. Major economic downturn, cozying up to dictators, cutting military support for Ukraine. Sometimes I really hate to be the “I told you so” guy.
And while all of that was happening, my mind was changing. Slowly but inevitably.
I became more anxious, more miserable, more cynical, more self-destructive.
The number of my mental breakdowns increased by a magnitude not seen in recent years, my struggles with extreme substance abuse as well. I just wanted to numb myself, ease the pain, even for just a few hours. And so I did. Over and over again.
My own life felt increasingly insignificant. As much as I cared about the state of the world around me, as little I did for myself.
But to make matters worse, politics was only one side of the coin.
I always had a great affinity for tech and frontier developments. Naturally, when AI systems became increasingly powerful, I was ready to dive deeper into their mechanisms. Even long before the broader public had their “AI moment” with the release of ChatGPT a few years ago.
Sure, at the beginning it was a lot of fun and games. Silly mistakes, weird hallucinations and not so useful outputs in general. But development started to pick up pace. Fast.
What used to be half or a year until a new powerful model was released, now we have new model releases almost every other month with increasing capabilities.
Most people are still only familiar with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and probably Google’s Gemini. Those more aligned with current trends are aware of how powerful Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet or Twitter’s (I will never call it X) Grok have become. But far fewer people know about Deepseek’s R1 or Alibaba’s Qwen and more. Vastly powerful (Chinese) open-source models that are far cheaper than their popular closed-source counterparts and almost as capable.
Or what about Sesame? A new voice model that is so indistinguishable from human speech that you can probably fool already 99% of all people with it. Remember the mantra: this is the worst it ever gets.
Pretty much every billion and trillion dollar company is investing insane resources into developing increasingly powerful models. Everyone wants to be the first to reach AGI.
But I’m not sure if AGI is even necessary to see the big impact of AI on human society. Social media is already full of sophisticated bots, sometimes used for ads or scams, other times for political campaigning or similar activities.
The CEOs of almost all major AI companies predict that by end of 2025 80-90% of all code will be written by machines. Which one should take with a grain of salt, since these people want to sell their products. But regardless whether it’s this year or the next or in two. No matter, if we get AGI in two years or in 20 (although more and more top scientists tend to agree it’s far sooner than we think) – our societies and, frankly, my tormented brain are not ready for what is to come.
I used to joke among friends that I’d like to find more and more ways to automate the boring stuff and focus only on bigger picture issues.
But what if bigger picture issues are not even for me to ponder about anymore? When we have systems vastly more capable and intelligent than any human could ever dream of? They don’t even have to be conscious, whatever that might mean, or truly understand everything to produce better ideas than most people could come up with in a lifetime.
We already have more and more studies that show how AI assisted or even purely AI generated ideas outperform humans by a large margin. New drugs via recombination of existing knowledge are being developed – discovered by AI. New materials, new ways to write code, to think, to teach, to govern and so forth.
Does it really matter if our (current) AI systems are “just” massive statistical token generators predicting the most likely outcome according to the query? Isn’t innovation often a recombination of existing knowledge?
We don’t need AGI to feel the impact of increasingly powerful AI systems. We are not ready for these and we are not ready for true AGI and certainly not ASI.
We have no concept of how to properly operate in a world where intelligence is an abundance resource. Where every answer is just a few keystrokes away.
It’s the first time in human history we have to deal with something smarter than us. Smart and agentic.
And no matter how many mistakes these systems still make – they will get to a point where all of these errors seem like a distant past. We already have a glimpse in how that could look like with AIs like Alpha Go – a highly specialised system trained on the game Go. Not a single human being comes even close to beating it.
Sure, general purpose AIs like GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet are trained differently than Alpha Go, because they need to be able to adjust to a variety of different tasks while Alpha Go only had one. But given enough time, resources and better algorithms – why shouldn’t general purpose AIs one day reach a similar level of proficiency as Alpha Go – but in pretty much every area of life?
Which makes my own predicament even more difficult. I already struggle a lot to care about myself and the more I learn about the trajectory of AI development, the more I struggle with finding purpose.
Why even do anything, if any meaningful task is being solved by AI in a few years anyway? Sometimes I really hope the sceptics will be proven right and all of this is just a huge, overvalued hype bubble.
But what if not? What if the smartest people in the world who are currently working on creating these systems are right and we are on the brink of a completely new era?
An “Age of Abundance” as some people hope for? Societal collapse due to billions of people being unemployed? The last days of the human species because a rogue AI creates a bioweapon wiping out most if not all of humanity?
Who can tell? I certainly can’t. But I also have no idea how to adjust to any of these possibilities.
Recently, I started a math degree because I felt like a loser among my PhD friends and wanted to prove to myself that I’m also capable of something. Plus, it couldn’t hurt to get a better understanding of the foundational math of AI systems along the way. But will this even matter in a few years? I have no idea.
I just sit here and scream into the void. Trapped inside my own head with questions I can’t answer. Like a rat in a cage, running in circles with no way out.
If I was looking for one word to describe my state of mind it would be: lost.
I have no idea where to go, what to do or even who I am anymore.
I hate how angry and cynical I’ve become.
How the shitty state of the world brought out my worst impulses and turned me into an even shittier person.
How I abandoned once cherished ideals, because I simply don’t care anymore.
How my empathy has become almost entirely exhausted.
How I’ve lost so many people who once were so dear to me.
How my own coping strategies fail more and more.
How the security nets I built start to crumble, because of my inability to properly maintain them.
How I disappoint more and more people.
How often I feel completely paralyzed, cursed with the inability to do anything meaningful.
How much I just want to burn it all down.
So many people around me seem to have it all figured out. Clear trajectory of life, precise goals and plans. I’m not even close to having a concept of a plan.
All I do is ponder over the same question over and over again. Torture my mind almost every waking hour. The complete loss of self. The Ego death. Some people take drugs for this state of mind. They must be crazy. It’s one of the worst feelings I ever had the displeasure of experiencing. If your identity is gone what else is left? What even matters anymore? For me, today and all the days after it’s always just one question.
Who am I?
Egotheist 