And, if there was a convincing version of a person-affecting view, it probably would change a fair amount of longtermist prioritization.
This is an interesting question in itself that I would love someone to explore in more detail. I don’t think it’s an obviously true statement. Two give a few counterpoints:
People have justified work on x-risk only thinking about the effects an existential catastrophe would have on people alive today (see here, here and here).
The EA longtermist movement has a significant focus on AI risks which I think stands up to a person-affecting view, given that it is a significant s-risk.
Broad longtermist approaches such as investing for the future, global priorities research and movement building seem pretty robust to plausible person-affecting views.
I’d really love to see a strong defense of person-affecting views, or a formulation of a person-affecting view that tries to address critiques made of them.
I’d point out this attempt which was well-explained in a forum post. There is also this which I haven’t really engaged with much but seems relevant. My sense is that the philosophical community has been trying to formulate a convincing person-affecting view and has, in the eyes of most EAs, failed. Maybe there is more work to be done though.
Human extinction in particular is plausibly good or not very important relative to other things on asymmetric person-affecting views, especially animal-inclusive ones, so I think we would see extinction risk reduction relatively deemphasized. Of course, extinction is also plausibly very bad on these views, but the case for this is weaker without the astronomical waste argument.
AI safety’s focus would probably shift significantly, too, and some of it may already be of questionable value on person-affecting views today. I’m not an expert here, though.
Broad longtermist interventions don’t seem so robustly positive to me, in case the additional future capacity is used to do things that are in expectation bad or of deeply uncertain value according to person-affecting views, which is plausible if these views have relatively low representation in the future.
Broad longtermist interventions don’t seem so robustly positive to me, in case the additional future capacity is used to do things that are in expectation bad or of deeply uncertain value according to person-affecting views, which is plausible if these views have relatively low representation in the future.
Fair enough. I shouldn’t really have said these broad interventions are robust to person-affecting views because that is admittedly very unclear. I do find these broad interventions to be robustly positive overall though as I think we will get closer to the ‘correct’ population axiology over time.
I’m admittedly unsure if a “correct” axiology even exists, but I do think that continued research can uncover potential objections to different axiologies allowing us to make a more ‘informed’ decision.
AI safety’s focus would probably shift significantly, too, and some of it may already be of questionable value on person-affecting views today. I’m not an expert here, though.
I’ve heard the claim that optimal approaches to AI safety may depend on one’s ethical views, but I’ve never really seen a clear explanation how or why. I’d like to see a write-up of this.
Granted I’m not as read up on AI safety as many, but I’ve always got the impression that the AI safety problem really is “how can we make sure AI is aligned to human interests?”, which seems pretty robust to any ethical view. The only argument against this that I can think of is that human interests themselves could be flawed. If humans don’t care about say animals or artificial sentience, then it wouldn’t be good enough to have AI aligned to human interests—we would also need to expand humanity’s moral circle or ensure that those who create AGI have an expanded moral circle.
Yeah those are fair—I guess it is slightly less clear to me that adopting a person-affecting view would impact intra-longtermist questions (though I suspect it would), but it seems more clear that person-affecting views impact prioritization between longtermist approaches and other approaches.
Some quick things I imagine this could impact on the intra-longtermist side:
Prioritization between x-risks that cause only human extinction vs extinction of all/most life on earth (e.g. wild animals).
EV calculations become very different in general, and probably global priorities research / movement building become higher priority than x-risk reduction? But it depends on the x-risk.
Yeah, I’m not actually sure that a really convincing person-affecting view can be articulated. But I’d be excited to see someone with a strong understanding of the literature really try.
I also would be interested in seeing someone compare the tradeoffs on non- views vs person-affecting. E.g. person affecting views might entail X weirdness, but maybe X weirdness is better to accept than the repugnant conclusion, etc.
I also would be interested in seeing someone compare the tradeoffs on non- views vs person-affecting. E.g. person affecting views might entail X weirdness, but maybe X weirdness is better to accept than the repugnant conclusion, etc.
Agreed—while I expect people’s intuitions on which is “better” to differ, a comprehensive accounting of which bullets different views have to bite would be a really handy resource. By “comprehensive” I don’t mean literally every possible thought experiment, of course, but something that gives a sense of the significant considerations people have thought of. Ideally these would be organized in such a way that it’s easy to keep track of which cases that bite different views are relevantly similar, and there isn’t double-counting.
This is an interesting question in itself that I would love someone to explore in more detail. I don’t think it’s an obviously true statement. Two give a few counterpoints:
People have justified work on x-risk only thinking about the effects an existential catastrophe would have on people alive today (see here, here and here).
The EA longtermist movement has a significant focus on AI risks which I think stands up to a person-affecting view, given that it is a significant s-risk.
Broad longtermist approaches such as investing for the future, global priorities research and movement building seem pretty robust to plausible person-affecting views.
I’d point out this attempt which was well-explained in a forum post. There is also this which I haven’t really engaged with much but seems relevant. My sense is that the philosophical community has been trying to formulate a convincing person-affecting view and has, in the eyes of most EAs, failed. Maybe there is more work to be done though.
I think a person-affecting approach like the following is promising, and it and the others you’ve cited have received little attention in the EA community, parhaps in part because of their technical nature: https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/teruji-thomas-the-asymmetry-uncertainty-and-the-long-term/
I wrote a short summary here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Btqex9wYZmtPMnq9H/debating-myself-on-whether-extra-lives-lived-are-as-good-as?commentId=yidnhcNqLmSGCsoG9
Human extinction in particular is plausibly good or not very important relative to other things on asymmetric person-affecting views, especially animal-inclusive ones, so I think we would see extinction risk reduction relatively deemphasized. Of course, extinction is also plausibly very bad on these views, but the case for this is weaker without the astronomical waste argument.
AI safety’s focus would probably shift significantly, too, and some of it may already be of questionable value on person-affecting views today. I’m not an expert here, though.
Broad longtermist interventions don’t seem so robustly positive to me, in case the additional future capacity is used to do things that are in expectation bad or of deeply uncertain value according to person-affecting views, which is plausible if these views have relatively low representation in the future.
Fair enough. I shouldn’t really have said these broad interventions are robust to person-affecting views because that is admittedly very unclear. I do find these broad interventions to be robustly positive overall though as I think we will get closer to the ‘correct’ population axiology over time.
I’m admittedly unsure if a “correct” axiology even exists, but I do think that continued research can uncover potential objections to different axiologies allowing us to make a more ‘informed’ decision.
I’ve heard the claim that optimal approaches to AI safety may depend on one’s ethical views, but I’ve never really seen a clear explanation how or why. I’d like to see a write-up of this.
Granted I’m not as read up on AI safety as many, but I’ve always got the impression that the AI safety problem really is “how can we make sure AI is aligned to human interests?”, which seems pretty robust to any ethical view. The only argument against this that I can think of is that human interests themselves could be flawed. If humans don’t care about say animals or artificial sentience, then it wouldn’t be good enough to have AI aligned to human interests—we would also need to expand humanity’s moral circle or ensure that those who create AGI have an expanded moral circle.
I would recommend CLR’s and CRS’s writeups for what more s-risk-focused work looks like:
https://longtermrisk.org/research-agenda
https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/EzoCZjTdWTMgacKGS/clr-s-recent-work-on-multi-agent-systems
https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/open-research-questions/ (especially the section Agential s-risks)
Yeah those are fair—I guess it is slightly less clear to me that adopting a person-affecting view would impact intra-longtermist questions (though I suspect it would), but it seems more clear that person-affecting views impact prioritization between longtermist approaches and other approaches.
Some quick things I imagine this could impact on the intra-longtermist side:
Prioritization between x-risks that cause only human extinction vs extinction of all/most life on earth (e.g. wild animals).
EV calculations become very different in general, and probably global priorities research / movement building become higher priority than x-risk reduction? But it depends on the x-risk.
Yeah, I’m not actually sure that a really convincing person-affecting view can be articulated. But I’d be excited to see someone with a strong understanding of the literature really try.
I also would be interested in seeing someone compare the tradeoffs on non- views vs person-affecting. E.g. person affecting views might entail X weirdness, but maybe X weirdness is better to accept than the repugnant conclusion, etc.
Agreed—while I expect people’s intuitions on which is “better” to differ, a comprehensive accounting of which bullets different views have to bite would be a really handy resource. By “comprehensive” I don’t mean literally every possible thought experiment, of course, but something that gives a sense of the significant considerations people have thought of. Ideally these would be organized in such a way that it’s easy to keep track of which cases that bite different views are relevantly similar, and there isn’t double-counting.
There are also person-neutral reasons for caring more about the extinction of all terrestrial life vs. human extinction. (Though it would be very surprising if this did much to reconcile person-affecting and person-neutral cause prioritization, since the reasons for caring in each case are so different: direct harms on sentient life, versus decreased probability that intelligent life will eventually re-evolve.)