This post describes attempts to help the future as speculative and non-robust in contrast to helping people today. But it doesn’t at all address the very robust strategy of simply saving resources for use in the future. That may not be the best strategy, but surely one can’t complain about its robustness.
There is some debate about this question today, of whether there are currently good opportunities to reduce existential risk. The general consensus appears to be that serious extinction risks are much more likely to exist in the future, and it is ambiguous whether we can do anything productive about them today.
However, there does appears to be a reasonable chance that such opportunities will exist in the future, with significant rather than tiny impacts. Even if we don’t do any work to identify them, the technological and social situation will change in unpredictable ways. Even foreseeable technological developments over the coming centuries present plausible extinction risks. If nothing else, there seems to be a good chance that the existence of machine intelligence will provide compelling opportunities to have a long-term impact unrelated to the usual conception of existential risk (this will be the topic of a future post).
If we believe this argument, then we can simply save money (and build other forms of capacity) until such an opportunity arises.
By accumulating resources for the future, we give increased power to whatever decision-makers in the future we bequeath these resources. (Whether these decision-makers are us in 20 years, or our descendants in 200 years.)
In a clueless world, why do we think that increasing their power is good? What if those future decision makers make a bad decision, and the increased resources we’ve given them mean the impact is worse?
In other words, if we are clueless today, why will we be less clueless in the future? One might hope cluelessness decreases monotonically over time, as we learn more, but so does the probability of a large mistake.
Robin Hanson, Paul Christiano, and others have made similar points in the past.
Hanson (2014):
Christiano (2014):
By accumulating resources for the future, we give increased power to whatever decision-makers in the future we bequeath these resources. (Whether these decision-makers are us in 20 years, or our descendants in 200 years.)
In a clueless world, why do we think that increasing their power is good? What if those future decision makers make a bad decision, and the increased resources we’ve given them mean the impact is worse?
In other words, if we are clueless today, why will we be less clueless in the future? One might hope cluelessness decreases monotonically over time, as we learn more, but so does the probability of a large mistake.
Indefinite accumulation of resources probably also increases the chance of being targeted by resource-seeking groups with military & political power.