How to stop being an AI doomer

What the evidence says

Worrying about AI is not a fringe reaction. In May 2023, AI scientists and industry leaders including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman signed a one-line statement that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."1 In a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 51% of US adults said they were more concerned than excited about AI, compared with 15% of the AI experts Pew surveyed.2

But nobody knows how this ends. In a survey of 2,778 researchers who had published at top AI venues, between 38% and 51% gave at least a 10% chance to advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction. Most were highly uncertain, and they disagreed about whether faster or slower progress would be better for humanity.3 Read plainly, the evidence supports neither "we are definitely doomed" nor "there is nothing to worry about". It supports uncertainty, which is harder to live with, and is the thing worth learning to manage.

The NHS suggests sorting worries into two kinds: problems you can do something practical about, and "hypothetical worries" that are beyond your control. For the second kind, its advice is to acknowledge them and move your attention on, rather than going over them again and again. It also suggests a short daily "worry time" of 10 or 15 minutes to write worries down and look for solutions.4 When the future feels uncertain, the NHS advises focusing on the day-to-day and on "what's in your power to do right now".5

The CDC's advice for coping with stress includes taking breaks from news and social media ("it is good to be informed, but constant information about negative events can be upsetting"), talking with people you trust about how you feel, regular sleep and physical activity.6

A useful comparison comes from climate change, another large, slow-moving global risk. In a survey of 10,000 people aged 16 to 25 in ten countries, 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change and more than 45% said those feelings affected their daily life and functioning. The researchers found that distress was linked to how people saw the response to the problem, not only to the problem itself.7 Feeling heavy about a real, shared risk is understandable. It becomes a problem for you when it stops you living your life.

The US National Institute of Mental Health advises getting help if you are struggling to cope, if symptoms of stress or anxiety won't go away, or if they interfere with your everyday life.8