Hmm, I guess I wasn’t being very careful. Insofar as “helping future humans” is a different thing than “helping living humans”, it means that we could be in a situation where the interventions that are optimal for the former are very-sub-optimal (or even negative-value) for the latter. But it doesn’t mean we must be in that situation, and in fact I think we’re not.
I guess if you think: (1) finding good longtermist interventions is generally hard because predicting the far-future is hard, but (2) “preventing extinction (or AI s-risks) in the next 50 years” is an exception to that rule; (3) that category happens to be very beneficial for people alive today too; (4) it’s not like we’ve exhausted every intervention in that category and we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for other things … If you believe all those things, then in that case, it’s not really surprising if we’re in a situation where the tradeoffs are weak-to-nonexistent. Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but something like that I guess?
I suspect that if someone had an idea about an intervention that they thought was super great and cost effective for future generations and awful for people alive today, well they would probably post that idea on EA Forum just like anything else, and then people would have a lively debate about it. I mean, maybe there are such things...Just nothing springs to my mind.
To me, the question is “what are the logical conclusions that longtermism leads to?” The idea that as of today we have not exhausted every intervention available is less relevant in considerations of 100s of thousand and millions of years.
I suspect that if someone had an idea about an intervention that they thought was super great and cost effective for future generations and awful for people alive today, well they would probably post that idea on EA Forum just like anything else, and then people would have a lively debate about it.
I agree. The debate would be whether to follow the moral reasoning of longtermism or not. Something that might be “awful for people alive today” is completely in line with longtermism—it could be the situation. To not support the intervention would constitute a break between theory and practice.
I think it is important to address the implications of this funny situation sooner rather than later.
Hmm, I guess I wasn’t being very careful. Insofar as “helping future humans” is a different thing than “helping living humans”, it means that we could be in a situation where the interventions that are optimal for the former are very-sub-optimal (or even negative-value) for the latter. But it doesn’t mean we must be in that situation, and in fact I think we’re not.
I guess if you think: (1) finding good longtermist interventions is generally hard because predicting the far-future is hard, but (2) “preventing extinction (or AI s-risks) in the next 50 years” is an exception to that rule; (3) that category happens to be very beneficial for people alive today too; (4) it’s not like we’ve exhausted every intervention in that category and we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for other things … If you believe all those things, then in that case, it’s not really surprising if we’re in a situation where the tradeoffs are weak-to-nonexistent. Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but something like that I guess?
I suspect that if someone had an idea about an intervention that they thought was super great and cost effective for future generations and awful for people alive today, well they would probably post that idea on EA Forum just like anything else, and then people would have a lively debate about it. I mean, maybe there are such things...Just nothing springs to my mind.
To me, the question is “what are the logical conclusions that longtermism leads to?” The idea that as of today we have not exhausted every intervention available is less relevant in considerations of 100s of thousand and millions of years.
I agree. The debate would be whether to follow the moral reasoning of longtermism or not. Something that might be “awful for people alive today” is completely in line with longtermism—it could be the situation. To not support the intervention would constitute a break between theory and practice.
I think it is important to address the implications of this funny situation sooner rather than later.