In this post, I will talk about how I cope with social anxiety, some doomer thoughts I’ve had about AI, and how I’m trying to improve and develop better models to deal with these issues.

I understand social anxiety as the kind of problem that requires some notion of metacognition: awareness and understanding of thought processes. That premise guided me on how I handle it, and the tools to do so, like writing. More practically, it lets you evaluate moral rules, ethics, understanding of your own capabilities, monitoring yourself, planning, and so on. Putting metacognition as a tool needed to handle and navigate through these topics makes it easier to understand that without such tooling, it would be harder or even impossible to reason about problems like social anxiety, primarily because the problem wouldn't even be a known problem for those people who lacks a proper metacognition development.

Bringing a personal experience, during a period when I was trying to reduce my anxiety, be more productive, etc, I convinced myself that it was all caused by social media, and I quit all of it, including chat apps like Discord. It will get worse, but only this first part is already a clear example of how poor my understanding of myself was. I justified by the perception of those problems (anxiety and productivity), the act of isolating me even more by quitting everything and to stop dealing with day problems, people, etc. It was essentially a way to avoid dealing with real-life chaos, and of course that during that time I would never have thought it could be cope.

AI

A different problem then emerged, and I started to become doomered about AI and, as a consequence, developed a lack of motivation to do the things I once used to enjoy (I used to have an active blog—not this one—and was excited about tech in general; I was always trying to build and/or learn something, was engaged in communities, and did things like running and working out).

The things I thought were most important have lost their subjective value since the rise of AI, and I'm not talking about specific activities like coding, but about intellectual activities in general. In fact, most of the value was never in the code, but in the problem it modeled.

“After AI, intellectual contributions become unnecessary or redundant. In the case of software: the AIs write all the code, so what’s the point of writing either code or prose? The audience for those things is now severely diminished. Humans don’t write code anymore, so they won’t read blog posts about how to write code, or tutorials, or try new libraries or programming languages. In the case of mathematics: the AIs can prove theorems, write papers, explain papers, tutor students, and in the near future, they might write entire textbooks better than humans. So what’s the point of writing a paper, or a textbook? It’s superfluous.

If intellectual activity is unnecessary—if there’s no consequence to designing a new programming language or publishing a paper, or if there’s simply no community to contribute to—then it won’t happen. There’s no point.

Now apply this to every other domain of intellectual activity, and you see what the future looks like. There may be individuals building new libraries and programming languages, but no shared culture of software engineering; there may be individual students and practitioners of mathematics, but no living community of mathematicians.” - No Man Is an Island by Fernando Borretti

I have discussed it with a friend, and he is more optimistic. His argument is that AI could never completely take over and devalue intellectual activity because it consists of two things:

1. Experiencing reality and consistently building abstractions and models of it based on that experience.
2. Inferring logical consequences from that experience.

To him, AI could handle the second part, but not the first one.

I don't have a conclusion about the AI questions, and I can't predict the future, so I’ll leave those questions open. I introduced this text with metacognition because it is also important here. I noticed my depression behavior, and started to reason how I could improve it, and what is causing it. I traced it back to everything I talked about in this article and also for the things I wouldn't share for privacy. A few things about this:

• I must try to understand why I’m thinking and behaving the way I do;
• Engage with different opinions so I don’t keep reinforcing my thoughts;
• Understand what is practical and stick it with. I can’t keep reasoning how bad AI is forever given how limited my actions on it are, so my effort should be directed to what is practical for me, and how to keep improving it;

That one is not practical for everyone, but working less in order to have time to develop yourself might also help, and AI can let you do it.