I agree with the core point, and that was part of my motivation for working on this area. There is a counterargument, as Ben says, which is that any particular intervention to promote Flourishing might be very non-robust.
And there is an additional argument, which is that in worlds in which you have successfully reduced x-risk, the future is more likely to be negative-EV (because worlds in which you have successfully reduced x-risk are more likely to be worlds in which x-risk is high, and those worlds are more likely to be going badly in general (e.g. great power war)).
I don’t think that wild animal suffering is a big consideration here, though, because I expect wild animals to be a vanishingly small fraction of the future population. Digital beings can inhabit a much wider range of environments than animals can, so even just in our own solar system in the future I’d expect there to be over a billion times as many digital beings as wild animals (the sun produces 2 billion times as much energy as lands on Earth); that ratio gets larger when looking to other star systems.
I agree with the core point, and that was part of my motivation for working on this area. There is a counterargument, as Ben says, which is that any particular intervention to promote Flourishing might be very non-robust.
And there is an additional argument, which is that in worlds in which you have successfully reduced x-risk, the future is more likely to be negative-EV (because worlds in which you have successfully reduced x-risk are more likely to be worlds in which x-risk is high, and those worlds are more likely to be going badly in general (e.g. great power war)).
I don’t think that wild animal suffering is a big consideration here, though, because I expect wild animals to be a vanishingly small fraction of the future population. Digital beings can inhabit a much wider range of environments than animals can, so even just in our own solar system in the future I’d expect there to be over a billion times as many digital beings as wild animals (the sun produces 2 billion times as much energy as lands on Earth); that ratio gets larger when looking to other star systems.