This is in response to Zvi Mowshowitz's "Little Echo" in which he discusses the secular solstice and the pessimistic situation with AI GCR (artificial intelligence global catastrophic risk). He discusses life and working to help make the situation better. He says "I believe that we will win". I am very grateful for the sentiment and ended up typing the following in response:

I have hope. I don't think "hope" is "thinking winning is likely". I think "hope" is "thinking it's possible and worth working to make more likely than it otherwise would be".

I don't think my believing is equipped to deal with things like this. I believe it's raining outside. I believe I should go jog and have my shower and get started with my day. I believe in my immediate surroundings. Everything beyond that feels like a trick. Work? Economies? Billions of people in many countries around the world? Data centers churning datasets into pattern generalization engines? These are things I think are real. I rationalize that they are real. I logically deduce that they are real... but I don't really believe they are real.

I don't believe we will win because I struggle to really believe we are even fighting. I imagine a billion bodies dropping dead. I imagine the process of a system comparing possibilities and actions and targeting outcome that have been encoded by our collective inattentiveness and imprecision. Actions and reactions leading the world irreparably off the path of anything I would consider good. I imagine these things and think... yes that is a logical conclusion of everything I know... but only vary rarely do I believe in it in the fully embodied way that I believe in the rain jacket I should be putting on. I believe it as much as I believe in a career I am trying to have in which I help solve the unsolvable problem... but all of that is just a ritual I go through as a result of my rationalization.

I don't know if I believe in believing anymore. What does the word "believe" even mean? I've focused on what "AI" and "minds" and "decision processes" and "outcome influencing systems" could be so much that "intelligence" and "belief" seem like illusions that stop making sense when you look at them carefully. I can't see them anymore... I see embodied sensory. I see abstract models in symbolic structures. I see expectation of constraints on the sets of possible outcomes.

So I don't "believe" we will win. I don't think it is likely we win. But I think winning is possible and winning is what I focus on. Winning is what I think about and rationalize about and apply logical deduction to. I hope other people will focus on winning. I hope it will be enough.