Thanks Toby—so, so exciting to see this work progressing!
One quibble:
The value of advancements and speed-ups depends crucially on whether they also bring forward the end of humanity. When they do, they have negative value
...when the area under the graph is mostly above the horizontal axis?
Even if you assign a vanishingly small probability to future trajectories in which the cumulative value of humanity/sentientkind is below zero, I imagine many of the intended users of this framework will at least sometimes want to model the impact of interventions in worlds where the default trajectory is negative (e.g. when probing the improbable)?
Maybe this is another ‘further development’ consciously left to others and I don’t know how much the adjustment would meaningfully change things anyway—I admit I’ve only skimmed the chapter! But I find it interesting that, for example, when you include the possibility of negative default trajectories, the more something looks like a ‘speed-up with an endogenous end time’ the less robustly bad it is (as you note), whereas the more it looks like a ‘gain’ the more robustly good it is .
Thanks Toby—so, so exciting to see this work progressing!
One quibble:
...when the area under the graph is mostly above the horizontal axis?
Even if you assign a vanishingly small probability to future trajectories in which the cumulative value of humanity/sentientkind is below zero, I imagine many of the intended users of this framework will at least sometimes want to model the impact of interventions in worlds where the default trajectory is negative (e.g. when probing the improbable)?
Maybe this is another ‘further development’ consciously left to others and I don’t know how much the adjustment would meaningfully change things anyway—I admit I’ve only skimmed the chapter! But I find it interesting that, for example, when you include the possibility of negative default trajectories, the more something looks like a ‘speed-up with an endogenous end time’ the less robustly bad it is (as you note), whereas the more it looks like a ‘gain’ the more robustly good it is .