I’d guess the story might be a) ‘XR primacy’ (~~ that x-risk reduction has far bigger bang for one’s buck than anything else re. impact) and b) conditional on a), an equivocal view on the value of technological progress: although some elements likely good, others likely bad, so the value of generally ‘buying the index’ of technological development (as I take Progress Studies to be keen on) to be uncertain.
”XR primacy”
Other comments have already illustrated the main points here, sparing readers from another belaboured rehearsal from me. The rough story, borrowing from the initial car analogy, is you have piles of open road/runway available if you need to use it, so velocity and acceleration are in themselves much less important than direction—you can cover much more ground in expectation if you make sure you’re not headed into a crash first.
This typically (but not necessarily, cf.) implies longtermism. ‘Global catastrophic risk’, as a longtermist term of art, plausibly excludes the vast majority of things common sense would call ‘global catastrophes’. E.g.:
[W]e use the term “global catastrophic risks” to refer to risks that could be globally destabilizing enough to permanently worsen humanity’s future or lead to human extinction. (Open Phil)
My impression is a ‘century more poverty’ probably isn’t a GCR in this sense. As the (pre-industrial) normal, the track record suggests it wasn’t globally destabilising to humanity or human civilisation. Even moreso if the matter is of a somewhat-greater versus somewhat-lower rate in its elimination.
This makes it’s continued existence no less an outrage to human condition. But, across the scales from threats to humankind’s entire future, it becomes a lower priority. Insofar as these things are traded-off (which seems to be implicit in any prioritisation given both compete for resources, whether or not there’s any direct cross-purposes in activity) the currency of XR reduction has much greater value.
Per discussion, there are a variety of ways the story sketched above could be wrong:
Longtermist consequentialism (the typical, if not uniquely necessary motivation for the above) is false, so we our exchange rate for common sense global catastrophes (inter alia) versus XR should be higher.
XR is either very low, or intractable, so XR reduction isn’t a good buy even on the exchange rate XR views endorse.
Perhaps the promise of the future could be lost with less of a bang but a whimper. Perhaps prolonged periods of economic or stagnation should be substantial subjects of XR concern in their own right, so PS-land and XR-land converge on PS-y aspirations.
I don’t see Pascalian worries as looming particularly large apart from these. XR-land typically takes the disjunction of risks and envelope of mitigation to be substantial/non-pascalian values. Although costly activity that buys an absolute risk reduction of 1/trillions looks dubious to common sense, 1/thousands + (e.g.) is commonplace (and commonsensical) when stakes are high enough.
It’s not clear how much of a strike that Pascalian counter-examples are constructable from the resources of a given view, and although the view wouldn’t endorse them, it doesn’t have a crisp story of decision theoretic arcana why not. Facially, PS seems susceptible to the same (e.g. a PS-ers work is worth billions per year, given the yield if you compound an (in expectation) 0.0000001% marginal increase in world GDP growth for centuries).
Buying the technological progress index?
Granting the story sketched above, there’s not a straightforward upshot on whether this makes technological progress generally good or bad. The ramifications of any given technological advance for XR are hard to forecast; aggregating over all of them to get a moving average harder still. Yet there seems a lot to temper fairly unalloyed enthusiasm around technological progress I take as the typical attitude in PS-land.
There’s obviously the appeal to the above sense of uncertainty: if at least significant bits of the technological progress portfolio credibly have very bad dividends for XR, you probably hope humanity is pretty selective and cautious in its corporate investments. It’d also generally surprise for what is best for XR to also be best for ‘progress’ (cf.)
The recent track record doesn’t seem greatly reassuring. The dual-use worries around nuclear technology remain profound 70+ years after their initial development, and ‘derisking’ these downsides remain remote. It’s hard to assess the true ex ante probability of a strategic nuclear exchange during the cold war, nor exactly how disastrous it would have been, but pricing in reasonable estimates of both probably takes a large chunk out of the generally sunny story of progress we observe ex post over the last century.
Insofar as folks consider disasters arising from emerging technologies (like AI) to represent the bulk of XR, this supplies concern against their rapid development in particular, and against exuberant technological development which may generate further dangers in general.
Some of this may just be a confusion of messaging (e.g. even though PS folks portray themselves as more enthusiastic and XR folks less so, both would actually be similarly un/enthusiastic for each particular case). I’d guess more of it is more substantive around the balance of promise and danger posed by given technologies (and the prospects/best means to mitigate the latter), which then feeds into more or less ‘generalized techno-optimism’.
But I’d guess the majority of the action is around the ‘modal XR account’ of XR being a great moral priority, which can be significantly reduced, and is substantially composed of risks from emerging technology. “Technocircumspection” seems a fairly sound corollary from this set of controversial conjuncts.
I’d guess the story might be a) ‘XR primacy’ (~~ that x-risk reduction has far bigger bang for one’s buck than anything else re. impact) and b) conditional on a), an equivocal view on the value of technological progress: although some elements likely good, others likely bad, so the value of generally ‘buying the index’ of technological development (as I take Progress Studies to be keen on) to be uncertain.
”XR primacy”
Other comments have already illustrated the main points here, sparing readers from another belaboured rehearsal from me. The rough story, borrowing from the initial car analogy, is you have piles of open road/runway available if you need to use it, so velocity and acceleration are in themselves much less important than direction—you can cover much more ground in expectation if you make sure you’re not headed into a crash first.
This typically (but not necessarily, cf.) implies longtermism. ‘Global catastrophic risk’, as a longtermist term of art, plausibly excludes the vast majority of things common sense would call ‘global catastrophes’. E.g.:
My impression is a ‘century more poverty’ probably isn’t a GCR in this sense. As the (pre-industrial) normal, the track record suggests it wasn’t globally destabilising to humanity or human civilisation. Even moreso if the matter is of a somewhat-greater versus somewhat-lower rate in its elimination.
This makes it’s continued existence no less an outrage to human condition. But, across the scales from threats to humankind’s entire future, it becomes a lower priority. Insofar as these things are traded-off (which seems to be implicit in any prioritisation given both compete for resources, whether or not there’s any direct cross-purposes in activity) the currency of XR reduction has much greater value.
Per discussion, there are a variety of ways the story sketched above could be wrong:
Longtermist consequentialism (the typical, if not uniquely necessary motivation for the above) is false, so we our exchange rate for common sense global catastrophes (inter alia) versus XR should be higher.
XR is either very low, or intractable, so XR reduction isn’t a good buy even on the exchange rate XR views endorse.
Perhaps the promise of the future could be lost with less of a bang but a whimper. Perhaps prolonged periods of economic or stagnation should be substantial subjects of XR concern in their own right, so PS-land and XR-land converge on PS-y aspirations.
I don’t see Pascalian worries as looming particularly large apart from these. XR-land typically takes the disjunction of risks and envelope of mitigation to be substantial/non-pascalian values. Although costly activity that buys an absolute risk reduction of 1/trillions looks dubious to common sense, 1/thousands + (e.g.) is commonplace (and commonsensical) when stakes are high enough.
It’s not clear how much of a strike that Pascalian counter-examples are constructable from the resources of a given view, and although the view wouldn’t endorse them, it doesn’t have a crisp story of decision theoretic arcana why not. Facially, PS seems susceptible to the same (e.g. a PS-ers work is worth billions per year, given the yield if you compound an (in expectation) 0.0000001% marginal increase in world GDP growth for centuries).
Buying the technological progress index?
Granting the story sketched above, there’s not a straightforward upshot on whether this makes technological progress generally good or bad. The ramifications of any given technological advance for XR are hard to forecast; aggregating over all of them to get a moving average harder still. Yet there seems a lot to temper fairly unalloyed enthusiasm around technological progress I take as the typical attitude in PS-land.
There’s obviously the appeal to the above sense of uncertainty: if at least significant bits of the technological progress portfolio credibly have very bad dividends for XR, you probably hope humanity is pretty selective and cautious in its corporate investments. It’d also generally surprise for what is best for XR to also be best for ‘progress’ (cf.)
The recent track record doesn’t seem greatly reassuring. The dual-use worries around nuclear technology remain profound 70+ years after their initial development, and ‘derisking’ these downsides remain remote. It’s hard to assess the true ex ante probability of a strategic nuclear exchange during the cold war, nor exactly how disastrous it would have been, but pricing in reasonable estimates of both probably takes a large chunk out of the generally sunny story of progress we observe ex post over the last century.
Insofar as folks consider disasters arising from emerging technologies (like AI) to represent the bulk of XR, this supplies concern against their rapid development in particular, and against exuberant technological development which may generate further dangers in general.
Some of this may just be a confusion of messaging (e.g. even though PS folks portray themselves as more enthusiastic and XR folks less so, both would actually be similarly un/enthusiastic for each particular case). I’d guess more of it is more substantive around the balance of promise and danger posed by given technologies (and the prospects/best means to mitigate the latter), which then feeds into more or less ‘generalized techno-optimism’.
But I’d guess the majority of the action is around the ‘modal XR account’ of XR being a great moral priority, which can be significantly reduced, and is substantially composed of risks from emerging technology. “Technocircumspection” seems a fairly sound corollary from this set of controversial conjuncts.