The 90% selfish component can have negative effects on welfare from a total utilitarian perspective, that aren’t necessarily outweighed by the 10%.
Yep, this can be true, but I’m skeptical this will matter much in practice.
I typically think things which aren’t directly optimizing for value or disvalue won’t have intended effects which are very important and that in the future unintended effects (externalities) won’t be that much of total value/disvalue.
When we see the selfish consumption of current very rich people, it doesn’t seem like the intentional effects are that morally good/bad relative to the best/worst uses of resources. (E.g. owning a large boat and having people think you’re high status aren’t that morally important relative to altruistic spending of similar amounts of money.) So for current very rich people the main issue would be that the economic process for producing the goods has bad externalities.
And, I expect that as technology advances, externalities reduce in moral importance relative to intended effects. Partially this is based on crazy transhumanist takes, but I feel like there is some broader perspective in which you’d expect this.
E.g. for factory farming, the ultimately cheapest way to make meat in the limit of technological maturity would very likely not involve any animal suffering.
Separately, I think externalities will probably look pretty similar for selfish resource usage for unaligned AIs and humans because most serious economic activities will be pretty similar.
Yep, this can be true, but I’m skeptical this will matter much in practice.
I typically think things which aren’t directly optimizing for value or disvalue won’t have intended effects which are very important and that in the future unintended effects (externalities) won’t be that much of total value/disvalue.
When we see the selfish consumption of current very rich people, it doesn’t seem like the intentional effects are that morally good/bad relative to the best/worst uses of resources. (E.g. owning a large boat and having people think you’re high status aren’t that morally important relative to altruistic spending of similar amounts of money.) So for current very rich people the main issue would be that the economic process for producing the goods has bad externalities.
And, I expect that as technology advances, externalities reduce in moral importance relative to intended effects. Partially this is based on crazy transhumanist takes, but I feel like there is some broader perspective in which you’d expect this.
E.g. for factory farming, the ultimately cheapest way to make meat in the limit of technological maturity would very likely not involve any animal suffering.
Separately, I think externalities will probably look pretty similar for selfish resource usage for unaligned AIs and humans because most serious economic activities will be pretty similar.