I’d be excited for AI welfare as an area to include a significant amount of explicitly longtermist work. Also, I find it plausible that heuristics like the one you mention will connect a lot of AI welfare work to the cosmic endowment. But I’m not convinced that it’d generally be a good idea to explicitly apply such heuristics in AI welfare work even for people who (unlike me) are fully convinced of longtermism. I expect a lot of work in this area to be valuable as building blocks that can be picked up from a variety of (longtermist and neartermist perspectives) and for such work’s value to often not be enhanced by the work explicitly discussing how to build with it from different perspectives or how the authors would build on it given their perspective. I also worry that if AI welfare work were generally framed in longtermist terms whenever applicable (even when robust to longtermism vs. neartermism), that could severely limit the impact of the area.
I’d be excited for AI welfare as an area to include a significant amount of explicitly longtermist work. Also, I find it plausible that heuristics like the one you mention will connect a lot of AI welfare work to the cosmic endowment. But I’m not convinced that it’d generally be a good idea to explicitly apply such heuristics in AI welfare work even for people who (unlike me) are fully convinced of longtermism. I expect a lot of work in this area to be valuable as building blocks that can be picked up from a variety of (longtermist and neartermist perspectives) and for such work’s value to often not be enhanced by the work explicitly discussing how to build with it from different perspectives or how the authors would build on it given their perspective. I also worry that if AI welfare work were generally framed in longtermist terms whenever applicable (even when robust to longtermism vs. neartermism), that could severely limit the impact of the area.