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It is beyond me why this author, clearly an intellectual serf, thinks that other people should be consuming his opinions.
This seems ludicrous as a decision-making guideline. Why should anyone's confidence in what anything will be like in a thousand years be large? Multiply that "I'm helping billions of future people" by a "I have a one in a billion shot of actually predicting out past a thousand years correctly" instead of something like "1%" and suddenly your "short term effect tie-breaker" should return to being the dominant term in your equation.
Is this an inaccurate representation or is it really that much of a faith-based religious thing?
EDIT: it also takes you to potentially all sorts of weird places around murder/birth control/abortion. If someone is murdered before they have children, the murderer cut off their life plus untold future generations. If they use birth control or abortion to avoid having kids, they've still cut off untold future generations. The "one" aspect of that becomes insignificant if you reason about a long enough timeline purely in terms of "future potential"... I don't get it at all. Not even the extremely religious place THAT extreme a value on hypothetical potential life.
I can't help but wonder why, now , someone has chosen to highlight what is still far too small a movement and treat it as though it were a dangerous threat, and then demonize it by associating it with a few of its wealthier proponents. Things like Effective Altruism and looking at existential risk are hardly drawing a substantial amount of attention right now; they should be, but they could get ten times the attentio…
This is terribly written. Weasel words, loaded questions, and vague ad-hominems everywhere. I truly cannot find any actual data, reasoning, or argumentation anywhere in the text. It is beyond me why this author, clearly an intellectual serf, thinks that other people should be consuming his opinions.
with that said, i do really dislike the focus on "climate change" as mediopolitically-mediated existential risk, as it's too abstract and it's potentially devastating effects also poorly discounted into the present. instead, let's rather focus more on pollution, especially of the air, ground, and water, which are palpable and immediate threats to lives, solutions to which will also intersect with the longer term problems implicated by climate change. pollution is a real risk today and into every far future, which is why it's worth pursuing now, rather than a single strand of future possibility.
I can't help but wonder why, now , someone has chosen to highlight what is still far too small a movement and treat it as though it were a dangerous threat, and then demonize it by associating it with a few of its wealthier proponents. Things like Effective Altruism and looking at existential risk are hardly drawing a substantial amount of attention right now; they should be, but they could get ten times the attentio…
Perhaps because some wealthy individuals with outsized influence+power are becoming so out of touch with the present they might cause outsized harm.
This is because mind uploading could be considered either suicide or murder (if the biological person dies in the process), and the resulting artificial being might itself either not be alive or not human (or at least not the same person as the biological human it's supposed to be, as the biological person is a separate being).
So if all humans were uploaded, then no humans would be left -- which would by definition be an existential risk to humanity.
Even if not all humans are uploaded, but a lot of them are, then the uploaded hive of beings (or whatever you want to call it) could itself either compete with or otherwise want to impose its will on biological humanity, which could itself present an existential risk of a more conventional sort.
There's also no practical way to put odds on what will happen in the distant future, Humans are notoriously bad at making predictions, even about the next 100 years. When I read quotes like that in the article like:
"Bostrom writes that if there is "a mere 1 percent chance" that 10^54 conscious beings (most living in computer simulations) come to exist in the future, then "we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.""
this seems like unjustified handwaving. There's no evidence that even a single human could exist in a computer simulation. At this point it's just wishful thinking that it will ever happen.
The "friendly AI" goal is also hubristically misguided. There's no reason to think a superintelligent being would remain in the paltry little cage stupid humans dream up for it. It might be "friendly" at first, or merely seem friendly, but in a little time (or eventually) it is likely to escape and do whatever it wants.
It also mischaracterizes the idea of existential threats as a fringe idea about the happiness of hypothetical simulated in the future. While this has been used to explore ethical questions, much like the trolley problem, the mainstream definition and application of existential threat is events that would cause humanity to go extinct.
The article also fails to engage with the fundamental philosophical and ethical claims it attributes to the longtermists. It doesn't say where and how their logic is faulty, it just ridicules the conclusions as outrageous and plays up the moral outrage.
YES, there are pitfalls in ethical evaluations with massive hypothetical outcomes. What solution do they offer... ignore the questions, don't think analyze or explore them? Don't iterate and improve them?
Longtermism is a perfectly reasonable stance to take, and no one is advocating that today’s problems should actually be dismissed - just that we need to balance those against these existential-type threats.
And we do this in our daily lives all the time. We deal with daily crises, but also plan for the future! Just like with a human life, we are encourage each other to live our best lives and reach our potentials, whatever those may be. Why can’t that be applied to a civilization, too?
Longtermism is nothing more than the civilization-scale version of saying “no” to drugs, or making the decision to stay in school rather than dropping out, or not getting in the car with a drunk driver. Each of those decisions poses an existential threat to the idea of a person’s future.
Deciding not to engage in destructive behavior so that your future remains full of possibilities does not mean that you must neglect immediate problems like where your next meal will come from or an argument you had with your spouse.
Basically, it’s my opinion that this article’s author is mostly attacking a strawman, with some not-very-well-thought-through moral grandstanding on top.
I am not sure that concern over "AI risk" is fungible with concern over climate change. In my experience, people concerned over superintelligent AI seem to be of a philosophical and cultural orientation which is entirely aware of the risks of climate change and favors some degree of directed action against it. I am not sure, on the other hand, that I could think of a single "climate denier" I've met who would even pa…
Climate change is always a risk but unlikely existential or at least to the extent it is we know how to handle it pretty well. So well that the number of climate related deaths have plummeted quite dramatically the last 100 years. We are constantly working on impacting nature in ways that make it safer for us whether we are talking building houses, using energy to keep warm or creating higher yield crop. AI isn't nec…
Climate change isn't a risk – there's still some uncertainty about it, but it's happening. Saying it's a risk is like saying riptides are a risk while you're in one. No! It's a danger! Get out of it by swimming perpendicularly to the shore!