Executive summary: This post provides brief summaries of several recent Global Priorities Institute (GPI) papers on topics including population ethics, consciousness, human extinction, and long-term impact estimation, highlighting their key arguments and conclusions.
Key points:
All person-affecting views in population ethics face serious issues, implying we should do more to reduce existential risk this century.
The Fading Qualia Argument suggests conscious AI systems may be possible in the near-term, but vagueness and holism of consciousness weaken confidence in the argument.
People consider human extinction prevention a priority, but not the single highest priority unless the risk is very high (around 30% this century).
Current theories of subjective duration of experiences do not clearly suggest that subjective duration itself affects the value of experiences.
The surrogate index method for estimating long-term treatment effects before long-term data is available involves a bias-variance tradeoff.
The ‘Egyptology’ argument, perhaps the most compelling case for Fanaticism in ethics, can be salvaged against a key objection.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: This post provides brief summaries of several recent Global Priorities Institute (GPI) papers on topics including population ethics, consciousness, human extinction, and long-term impact estimation, highlighting their key arguments and conclusions.
Key points:
All person-affecting views in population ethics face serious issues, implying we should do more to reduce existential risk this century.
The Fading Qualia Argument suggests conscious AI systems may be possible in the near-term, but vagueness and holism of consciousness weaken confidence in the argument.
People consider human extinction prevention a priority, but not the single highest priority unless the risk is very high (around 30% this century).
Current theories of subjective duration of experiences do not clearly suggest that subjective duration itself affects the value of experiences.
The surrogate index method for estimating long-term treatment effects before long-term data is available involves a bias-variance tradeoff.
The ‘Egyptology’ argument, perhaps the most compelling case for Fanaticism in ethics, can be salvaged against a key objection.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.