This is partially an accurate objection (i.e., I do think that x-risks and other longtermist concerns tend to significantly outweigh near-term problems such as in health and development), but there is an important distinction to make with my objections to certain aspects of space governance:
Contingent on AI timelines, there is a decent chance that none of our efforts will even have a significantly valuable near-term effect (i.e., we won’t achieve our goals by the time we get AGI). Consider the following from the post/article:
If the cost of travelling to other planetary bodies continues the trend in the chart above and falls by an order of magnitude or so, then we might begin to build increasingly permanent and self-sustaining settlements. Truly self-sustaining settlements are a long way off, but both NASA and China have proposed plans for a Moon base, and China recently announced plans to construct a base on Mars.
Suppose that it would take ~80 years to develop meaningful self-sustaining settlements on Mars without AGI or similar forms of superintelligence. But suppose that we get AGI/superintelligence in ~60 years: we might get misaligned AGI and all the progress (and humanity) is erased and it fails to achieve its goals; we might create aligned AGI which might obsolesce all ~60 years of progress within 5 or so years (I would imagine even less time); or we might get something unexpected or in between, in which case maybe it does matter?
In contrast, at least with health and development causes you can argue “I let this person live another ~50 years… and then the AGI came along and did X.”
Furthermore, this all is based on developing self-sustaining settlements being a valuable endeavor, which I think is often justified with ideas that we’ll use those settlements for longer-term plans and experimentation for space exploration, which requires an even longer timeline.
This is partially an accurate objection (i.e., I do think that x-risks and other longtermist concerns tend to significantly outweigh near-term problems such as in health and development), but there is an important distinction to make with my objections to certain aspects of space governance:
Contingent on AI timelines, there is a decent chance that none of our efforts will even have a significantly valuable near-term effect (i.e., we won’t achieve our goals by the time we get AGI). Consider the following from the post/article:
Suppose that it would take ~80 years to develop meaningful self-sustaining settlements on Mars without AGI or similar forms of superintelligence. But suppose that we get AGI/superintelligence in ~60 years: we might get misaligned AGI and all the progress (and humanity) is erased and it fails to achieve its goals; we might create aligned AGI which might obsolesce all ~60 years of progress within 5 or so years (I would imagine even less time); or we might get something unexpected or in between, in which case maybe it does matter?
In contrast, at least with health and development causes you can argue “I let this person live another ~50 years… and then the AGI came along and did X.”
Furthermore, this all is based on developing self-sustaining settlements being a valuable endeavor, which I think is often justified with ideas that we’ll use those settlements for longer-term plans and experimentation for space exploration, which requires an even longer timeline.