You could make an argument that a certain kind of influence strictly decreases with time. So the hinge was at the Big Bang.
But, there (probably) weren’t any agents around to control anything then, so maybe you say there was zero influence available at that time. Everything that happened was just being determined by low level forces and fields and particles (and no collections of those could be reasonably described as conscious agents).
Today, much of what happens (on Earth) is determined by conscious agents, so in some sense the total amount of extant influence has grown.
Let’s maybe call the first kind of influence time-priority, and the second agency. So, since the Big Bang, the level of time-priority influence available in the universe has gone way down, but the level of aggregate agency in the universe has gone way up.
On a super simple model that just takes these two into account, you might multiply them together to get the total influence available at a certain time (and then divide by the number of people alive at that time to get the average person’s influence). This number will peak somewhere in the middle (assuming it’s zero both at the Big Bang and at the Heat Death).
That maybe doesn’t tell you much, but then you could start taking into account some other considerations, like how x-risk could result in a permanent drop of agency down to zero. Or how perhaps there’s an upper limit on how much agency is potentially available in the universe.
In any case, it seems like the direction of causality should be a pretty important part of the analysis (even if it points in the opposite direction of another factor, like increasing agency), either as part of the prior or as one of the first things you update on.
You could make an argument that a certain kind of influence strictly decreases with time. So the hinge was at the Big Bang.
But, there (probably) weren’t any agents around to control anything then, so maybe you say there was zero influence available at that time. Everything that happened was just being determined by low level forces and fields and particles (and no collections of those could be reasonably described as conscious agents).
Today, much of what happens (on Earth) is determined by conscious agents, so in some sense the total amount of extant influence has grown.
Let’s maybe call the first kind of influence time-priority, and the second agency. So, since the Big Bang, the level of time-priority influence available in the universe has gone way down, but the level of aggregate agency in the universe has gone way up.
On a super simple model that just takes these two into account, you might multiply them together to get the total influence available at a certain time (and then divide by the number of people alive at that time to get the average person’s influence). This number will peak somewhere in the middle (assuming it’s zero both at the Big Bang and at the Heat Death).
That maybe doesn’t tell you much, but then you could start taking into account some other considerations, like how x-risk could result in a permanent drop of agency down to zero. Or how perhaps there’s an upper limit on how much agency is potentially available in the universe.
In any case, it seems like the direction of causality should be a pretty important part of the analysis (even if it points in the opposite direction of another factor, like increasing agency), either as part of the prior or as one of the first things you update on.