Andrew Critch

I feel bad that a lot of people feel like they have no one to call about their concerns about existential risk, or adjacent topics that seem very important to them because of relevance to existential risk. I feel especially bad about this when folks contact me about such topics and I don’t have time to give a good response. This post is meant to encourage behavior that can gradually shift the world in a more positive direction for addressing people’s worries about x-risk.

I love my local fire department. There were serious wildfires in my area over the past year, and at times I felt worried about them. A few times, I called my local fire department for updates on the situation. They answered the phone, kindly responded to my questions about the fires, and told me how to sign up for more frequent updates. They tested their update system, and I received the tests. Conditional on the wildfires, I was quite happy about their responsiveness to my need for more information. Almost no one died of wildfires in California last year.

Who can you call if you’re worried about existential risk (x-risk), or global catastrophic risks more broadly? A lot of people have contacted me about this topic because it is my area of professional focus, particular as it pertains to artificial intelligence. I feel bad that I can’t be as responsive to them as my local fire department has been to me. If people are worried about x-risk, there should be someone they can call to get more information about it. My local fire department is the de facto best source of information about local fires, and is recognized as such, but currently there is no globally-recognized best source of information about x-risk (although some institutions are doing quite well in this regard in my opinion; see below.) So who should you be contacting if you’re worried about x-risk? Here’s what I suggest:

1) Therapists, for advice on managing your priorities or feelings. If you’re having trouble concentrating on other important things in your life (sleep, food, family, friends, work) because you can’t stop thinking about x-risk, please see a therapist. Seeing a therapist is also a good idea if you’re just worried and wish you could manage the anxiety better. You might feel that therapists don’t know anything about x-risk, but if you see 3-5 different therapists and pick the one you like best, you will probably find one that can help you manage your anxiety and focus your thinking about x-risk in ways that are non-destructive to your health and lifestyle. If you feel your therapist doesn’t understand you, tell them it bothers you that they don’t seem to understand you and you want to spend more of your time with them resolving that. If you feel your therapist doesn’t understand existential risk because it’s too abstract or intellectual, look for a therapist with a PhD, who is therefore more likely to be open to academic conversations.

It’s important to learn to manage one’s fears, anxieties, and frustrations around this topic before attempting to engage with experts on it; otherwise the conversation will probably be unproductive.

2) Academics, for expert information. If you need information directly from experts, you can try contacting personnel at research institutions who think about existential risk, such as:

• The Center for the Study of Existential Risk (Cambridge)
• The Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford)
• The Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (Stanford)

However, these folks are extremely busy, and probably won’t have time to respond to most people’s questions. In that case, I suggest contacting your local university instead. Even if you don’t get a good answer, you create evidence that people would like to be able to contact their local university with questions about x-risk, which over time can help can create jobs for people who want to think and communicate about x-risk professional. If that fails, you can also try:

3) Government representatives, for basic information, or as expert proxies. If you’re having a hard time reaching experts, or just want basic information about how governments and companies manage x-risk, I suggest you contact local representatives of your municipal or state government. They will not know as much about the topic as you’d like, so you should ask them to gather more information and get back to you about it. They might have better luck getting a conversation with experts than you will, and after they do that, they might be slightly better at answering future questions about the topic. In other words, you’ll have helped the government focus a bit more of its attention on x-risk, and thereby helped them to become slightly more informed about the topic.

Much of the government is responsive rather than proactive in nature, such that it can mostly only pay attention to topics if people pressure or expect them to. If we never ask, our governments will never learn to answer.

A note on contacting the government: Some folks I know have expressed that it would be bad for governments to get too interested in existential risk, because then the issue will become politicized in a way that damages discourse about it. I think there is some truth to this concern, however, I think this is higher order effect and is therefore less concerning than the problem of causing the government to gradually become more responsible and responsive to the topic. I think the kind of gradual force that’s created by contacting local representatives in a democracy creates a net-positive effect for the issue at hand, even if a certain amount of political machination inevitably ends up emerging around the topic.

Cemeteries and funerals are beautiful, because they tell a story of the past that we care about. They’re also somewhat expensive: families routinely spend on the order of $10k on funeral and burial rites for their families. There are people whose entire jobs are the preparation of bodies for funeral rites. Can we tell the story of the past better, but for the same cost?

I believe we can. If your loved one is close to death or has recently died, instead of planning for an expensive burial funeral, you might consider instead planning for the cheapest possible disposal of their earthly remains, and use the excess money to hire a biographer. The biographer can talk to your loved one’s family, and even your loved one directly if they haven’t yet passed, and write down people’s most treasured or meaningful memories about them. Your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren could have much more than a tombstone to remember them by.

If more people adopted this tradition, cemeteries could become libraries where we keep tomes of stories about our lost loved ones, both bitter and sweet. When we bring flowers to the cemetery, we could leave them next to a book containing their life story. We could re-read their memories, and perhaps even take some time to read through the memories of other people we don’t know, and develop a feeling of what it was like to be them. Probably some people would take an interest in reading the stories even of strangers. Perhaps these “cemetery historians” would even bond when they meet at the cemetery, and recommend their favorite stories to each other. Together, we’d have a culture more capable of preserving and cherishing the memories of the people we’ve lost.

Sure, the biographies wouldn’t always be perfectly accurate, and perhaps far from it. Some biographers might offer to exaggerate in order to create more favorable stories. But we’d all know that to be the case, and we might even become more aware of the inconsistencies between our stories of the past if we could read many different accounts of what happened. And I know I’d spend more time enjoying the beautiful landscape of cemeteries if there were also books there to read about the people who were buried there.

How could we transition to such a culture?

1. Writers: advertise yourselves as end-of-life biographers. If you’re a writer willing to write stories about people around the ends of their lives, tell people you’re willing to do it, and name your price. Start a website. Pioneer a culture. Try partnering with a local funeral home to make it easier for grieving families to find you and get your help.
2. Funeral homes: partner with biographers. Offer to connect biographers with grieving families in exchange for percentage of the fee paid for their service.
3. Families with dying loved ones: make a social media post seeking a biographer. Let your desire to preserve the memories of your loved one clear and visible to people you know. Decide an amount you’re willing to pay—or range of amounts, say “Between \$1000 and \$3000″—and let people know that you’re interested in their help writing up a biography for your loved one. Let them know it doesn’t have to be perfect, and that something is better than nothing (if that’s how you feel).

I realize there would be lots of challenging questions and priorities for the biographers and families to sort out. But that’s why it’s a job. Funeral directors get used to dealing with grieving families, and learn to accommodate their preferences as best they can. I believe end-of-life biographers could learn to do the same. And I wager that, in 50 years time, if we’re all still around to read the stories they right, we’ll be glad of their work.

If I’ve sent you a link to this blog post, it’s probably because your .edu email address is not already associated with a Google account, and I got a notification about that when sharing a doc or calendar item with you. To fix this problem permanently, open a browser logged into a gmail account (create a new one if you don’t want to use your personal one), and go to:
https://myaccount.google.com/alternateemail

From there, you can add email addresses that will actually work for receiving things like Google doc invitations and Google calendar invitations. This is somewhat new, and different from just setting up a “send mail as” setting in gmail, because it applies to all google services at once.

Give it a try, and save us both a bunch of future hassle 🙂