This reminds me of COVID

I was in 6th grade in January of 2020. I lived a 45 minute drive from my middle school, and as it started each day infuriatingly (at least, to my sixth-grade self) early at 7:15, I would find myself in the ice-cream-stained back seat of our aging Honda CRV, my dad racing through the cornfields of Waxhaw, North Carolina as to not garner me another tardy (though often this was my own fault by failing to wake up early enough).

These winter car rides, with the gray dawn peeking over the fog-soaked fields outside the window, were narrated by the live CNN feed on my dad’s phone precariously balanced on the dashboard, Anderson Cooper reading out that morning’s breaking news. At this point in my life, Apple News held the highest share of screen time on my phone, and I would feverishly scroll my curated feed until I sadly reached the pit of articles at the bottom about celebrity gossip and sports news.

I remember the first time I brought up COVID. It was the second week of January, and school had just restarted after winter break. Somewhat premonitiously, we had just watched the movie Contagion, which would of course gain a renewed prominence after COVID broke mainstream. Viruses on my mind, the algorithm brought an article about a mysterious outbreak of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China to my feed. By now, my parents in the front seat were used to hearing me bring up every other news article I read to their ears, and of course, when I told them about this interesting new infection, they said the equivalent of “damn, that’s crazy” and went back to listening to the CNN feed.

Of course, it would be wrong to say that I was particularly engaged by the article: I’ve always considered myself to be a part of the “nothing ever happens” lineage, and imagining such a drastic change to the status quo was strictly beyond my Overton window. And so the weeks went, and every day, there would curiously be another article about that mysterious disease in China.

It was thus in February when I finally updated my priors, though as all sixth-graders do with little knowledge about the world, perhaps a bit too much. Suddenly, I was convinced that the world would end, that civilizations would collapse, and that human society would be rendered back to a state of pre-agricultural tribalism. There was a stange giddiness within me: I had always wished to inhabit a moment when the world changed in such a drastic way as to make all that came before it utterly unrecognizable (I had perhaps been reading too many dystopian sci-fi novels). If there was a LessWrong for COVID, I would have been the most diehard Yudkowskyite (though…enthusiastic about p(doom)?). I began wearing masks in February, two months before the CDC officially reccomended them, and COVID was all I could talk about to my classmates (I’m sure I was very insufferable).

Finally though, in March, the pandemic was declared, and the rest was history. While the world didn’t end and COVID is certainly a very distant memory in 2026 for something that ended only 3-4 years ago and disrupted the entire world, the fact that nearly all of humanity was sequestered in their homes in shelter from a novel virus is certainly a large update from “nothing ever happens.”

AGI

Right now, I feel like February. There is a vast, great rumbling happening beneath our feet, and we cannot yet see it. The vast majority of the public does not know what an agent or an agent swarm is, though just as we became familiar with mRNA and spike proteins, it will eventually happen. According to this study by the Brookings Institute, only 57% of the American public use AI, and out of those, 74% use it for simply internet searches. A large part of the “nothing ever happens” crowd with respect to AI is an unawareness of the capabilities of these intelligent systems; that they can autonomously research, create, plan, and coordinate, and in many cases, act at odds with their human overseers. We do not need AGI or malicious misalignment to cause a drastic societal change. If we have agents as misaligned simply as the Hugging Face incident but with much stronger capabilities, we will have disaster.

But February Ankit was wrong. The world didn’t end. Civilization didn’t collapse, and there are still dumb monkeys proliferating on this lonely rock in the void. But I believe there is a world where he could have been right: a world where we didn’t quarantine, where we didn’t take masks and vaccines and other safeguards, a world where be believed that all the doomsayers were radical Yudkowskyites and went about our day.

I feel very scared. This fear does not come from the most adverse posssibilities, but the idea that my confidence interval is unbounded again. Something will happen, and I hope that once again, we listen to the doomers before we prove them right.