The term ‘humanity’ is definitely intended to be interpreted broadly. I was more explicit about this in The Precipice and forgot to reiterate it in this paper. I certainly want to include any worthy successors to homo sapiens. But it may be important to understand the boundary of what counts. A background assumption is that the entities are both moral agents and moral patients — capable of steering the future towards what matters and for being intrinsically part of what matters. I’m not sure if those assumptions are actually needed, but they were guiding my thought.
I definitely don’t intend to include alien civilisations or future independent earth-originating intelligent life. The point is to capture the causal downstream consequences of things in our sphere of control. So the effects of us on alien civilisations should be counted and any effects we have of on whether any earth species evolves after us, but it isn’t meant to be a graph of all value in the universe. My methods wouldn’t work for that, as we can’t plausibly speed that up, or protect it all etc (unless we were almost all the value anyway).
The term ‘humanity’ is definitely intended to be interpreted broadly. I was more explicit about this in The Precipice and forgot to reiterate it in this paper. I certainly want to include any worthy successors to homo sapiens. But it may be important to understand the boundary of what counts. A background assumption is that the entities are both moral agents and moral patients — capable of steering the future towards what matters and for being intrinsically part of what matters. I’m not sure if those assumptions are actually needed, but they were guiding my thought.
I definitely don’t intend to include alien civilisations or future independent earth-originating intelligent life. The point is to capture the causal downstream consequences of things in our sphere of control. So the effects of us on alien civilisations should be counted and any effects we have of on whether any earth species evolves after us, but it isn’t meant to be a graph of all value in the universe. My methods wouldn’t work for that, as we can’t plausibly speed that up, or protect it all etc (unless we were almost all the value anyway).