You talk about progress today being of macroscopic relevance if we get an exogenous make-or-break event in the period where progress is continuing. I think it should really be if we get such an event in the period where progress is continuing exponentially. If we’ve moved into a phase of polynomial growth (plausible for instance if our growth is coming from spreading out spatially) then it seems less valuable. I’m relying here on a view that our (subjective) chances of dealing with such events scale with the logarithm of our resources. I don’t think that this changes your qualitative point.
I do think that endogenous risk over the next couple of centuries is of at least comparable size as exogenous risk over the period before exponential growth. I think that increasing the resources devoted to dealing with endogenous risk by 1% will reduce these risks by a similar amount that increases prosperity by 1% will reduce long-term exogenous risks. And I think it’s probably easier to get that 1% increase in the first case than the second one, in large part because there are a lot fewer people already trying to do that.
You talk about progress today being of macroscopic relevance if we get an exogenous make-or-break event in the period where progress is continuing. I think it should really be if we get such an event in the period where progress is continuing exponentially. If we’ve moved into a phase of polynomial growth (plausible for instance if our growth is coming from spreading out spatially) then it seems less valuable. I’m relying here on a view that our (subjective) chances of dealing with such events scale with the logarithm of our resources. I don’t think that this changes your qualitative point.
I do think that endogenous risk over the next couple of centuries is of at least comparable size as exogenous risk over the period before exponential growth. I think that increasing the resources devoted to dealing with endogenous risk by 1% will reduce these risks by a similar amount that increases prosperity by 1% will reduce long-term exogenous risks. And I think it’s probably easier to get that 1% increase in the first case than the second one, in large part because there are a lot fewer people already trying to do that.