Interesting angle that I hadn’t considered before!
Presumably this reasoning would change the calculus for a lot of other actions one could take as well? E.g. various types of global development spending that pay off in the future (e.g. deworming) would become worse relative to spending that pays off soon (e.g. bednets).
Rather than a mere 14 QALYs, kidney donation produces hundreds if not thousands of expected QALYs.
I feel that this may be too strong a claim. In the very long run, I would expect the population to rise to whatever the carrying capacity was (or whatever level was agreed on by the AI or something). So saving a life now would be good (+~7 years) but not worth thousands of years of QALYs, as a new person might well have come into existence if the kidney donee had died.
In particular, this argument reminds me of discussions about cryonics possibly being an EA cause—e.g. Jeff Kaufman’s essay on the subject here. Excerpt of the most relevant part:
If you’re a total hedonistic utilitarian, caring about there being as many good lives over all time as possible, deaths averted isn’t the real metric. Instead the question is how many lives will there be and how good are they? In a future society with the technology to revive cryonics patients there would still be some kind of resource limits bounding the number of people living or being emulated. Their higher technology would probably allow them to have as many people alive as they chose, within those bounds. If they decided to revive people, this would probably come in place of using those resources to create additional people or run more copies of existing people.
Interesting angle that I hadn’t considered before!
Presumably this reasoning would change the calculus for a lot of other actions one could take as well? E.g. various types of global development spending that pay off in the future (e.g. deworming) would become worse relative to spending that pays off soon (e.g. bednets).
I feel that this may be too strong a claim. In the very long run, I would expect the population to rise to whatever the carrying capacity was (or whatever level was agreed on by the AI or something). So saving a life now would be good (+~7 years) but not worth thousands of years of QALYs, as a new person might well have come into existence if the kidney donee had died.
In particular, this argument reminds me of discussions about cryonics possibly being an EA cause—e.g. Jeff Kaufman’s essay on the subject here. Excerpt of the most relevant part: