As I said in another comment, one relevant complication seems to be that risk and growth interact. In particular, the interaction might be such that speeding up growth could actually have negative value. This has been debated for a long time, and I don’t think the answer is obvious. It might something we’re clueless about.
(a) “People are so badly mistaken (or their values so misaligned with mine) that they systematically do harm when they intend to do good, or”
(b) “Other (particularly self-interested) activities are harmful on average.”
Conditional on (b) we might worry that speeding up growth would work via increasing the amount or efficiency of various self-interested activities, and thus would be harmful.
I’m not sure if I buy the argument, though. It is based on “approximat[ing] the changes that occur each day as morally neutral on net”. But on longer timescales it seems that we should be highly uncertain about the value of changes. It thus seems concerning to me to look at a unit of time for which the magnitude of change is unintuitively small, round it to zero, and extrapolate from this to a large-scale conclusion.)
As I said in another comment, one relevant complication seems to be that risk and growth interact. In particular, the interaction might be such that speeding up growth could actually have negative value. This has been debated for a long time, and I don’t think the answer is obvious. It might something we’re clueless about.
(See Paul Christiano’s How useful is “progress”? for an ingenious argument for why either
(a) “People are so badly mistaken (or their values so misaligned with mine) that they systematically do harm when they intend to do good, or”
(b) “Other (particularly self-interested) activities are harmful on average.”
Conditional on (b) we might worry that speeding up growth would work via increasing the amount or efficiency of various self-interested activities, and thus would be harmful.
I’m not sure if I buy the argument, though. It is based on “approximat[ing] the changes that occur each day as morally neutral on net”. But on longer timescales it seems that we should be highly uncertain about the value of changes. It thus seems concerning to me to look at a unit of time for which the magnitude of change is unintuitively small, round it to zero, and extrapolate from this to a large-scale conclusion.)