Future life may turn out to be net negative (e.g. s-risks might become real), and work that preserves the chances of humanity spreading may essentially be enabling that.
In almost the opposite direction, AI might just be very useful and beneficial and a bunch of the risks people in AI safety worry about might not end up becoming real, or might be quite easy to overcome. And in the meantime, AI safety work may have:
Slowed down the rate at which we achieve those things
Decreased the chance we ever achieve them (e.g. if a pause leads to a ban etc)
Distracted talent and money from working on more valuable things
On your first sentence, not sure if you read footnote 3 - I believe I cover under the “value of the future” bullet point why I didn’t include this. (combined with AIs probably being moral patients).
And your three bullet points, very briefly:
From a longtermist perspective, not important.
I consider permanent stagnation pretty unlikely for evolutionary reasons, eventually factions that want to grow will be selected for.
Yeah it’s a factor, but AI just seems important enough that I highly doubt that it’s a major one.
I hadn’t read footnote 3! And I agree that the 2nd list looks less important from a solely longtermist perspective. (They may still be reasons that AI safety ends up doing significant harm though; I hadn’t realised you were taking a ‘strong longtermist’ stance in the post.)
Ah yeah, maybe I should have made that clear, sorry. The original post that the list came from did, and I didn’t think of that when I just copied the list over.
Future life may turn out to be net negative (e.g. s-risks might become real), and work that preserves the chances of humanity spreading may essentially be enabling that.
In almost the opposite direction, AI might just be very useful and beneficial and a bunch of the risks people in AI safety worry about might not end up becoming real, or might be quite easy to overcome. And in the meantime, AI safety work may have:
Slowed down the rate at which we achieve those things
Decreased the chance we ever achieve them (e.g. if a pause leads to a ban etc)
Distracted talent and money from working on more valuable things
On your first sentence, not sure if you read footnote 3 - I believe I cover under the “value of the future” bullet point why I didn’t include this. (combined with AIs probably being moral patients).
And your three bullet points, very briefly:
From a longtermist perspective, not important.
I consider permanent stagnation pretty unlikely for evolutionary reasons, eventually factions that want to grow will be selected for.
Yeah it’s a factor, but AI just seems important enough that I highly doubt that it’s a major one.
I hadn’t read footnote 3! And I agree that the 2nd list looks less important from a solely longtermist perspective. (They may still be reasons that AI safety ends up doing significant harm though; I hadn’t realised you were taking a ‘strong longtermist’ stance in the post.)
Ah yeah, maybe I should have made that clear, sorry. The original post that the list came from did, and I didn’t think of that when I just copied the list over.