It’s certainly not as strong an attractor state as extinction, but I still think it’s an attractor state to some extent. Certainly wild animals (especially when you consider aquatic life) have and likely will exist for a very long time unless we take extreme action to get rid of them or there’s a particularly intense catastrophe.
Also I agree with Michael on the relevance of space colonisation. Many total utilitarians can’t wait for space colonisation as it will significantly reduce x-risk. I get this thinking, but I hope we don’t bring non-human animals. As I say in the post, it seems safer to make them go extinct.
On discounting, uncertainty over future discount rates (perhaps due to uncertainty about future x-risk which may become lower than it is now) leads to a declining discount rate over time and the result that we should discount the longterm future as if we were in the safest world among those we find plausible. This is known as Weitzman discounting. From Greaves’ paper Discounting for Public Policy:
In a seminal article, Weitzman (1998) claimed that the correct results [when uncertain about the discount rate] are given by using an effective discount factor for any given time t that is the probability-weighted average of the various possible values for the true discount factor R(t): Reff(t) = E[R(t)]. From this premise, it is easy to deduce, given the exponential relationship between discount rates and discount factors, that if the various possible true discount rates are constant, the effective discount rate declines over time, tending to its lowest possible value in the limit t → ∞.
Therefore we can’t really wave away the very long-term future, assuming of course that Weitzman is correct (he may not be, see the “Weitzman-Gollier puzzle”).
It’s certainly not as strong an attractor state as extinction, but I still think it’s an attractor state to some extent. Certainly wild animals (especially when you consider aquatic life) have and likely will exist for a very long time unless we take extreme action to get rid of them or there’s a particularly intense catastrophe.
Also I agree with Michael on the relevance of space colonisation. Many total utilitarians can’t wait for space colonisation as it will significantly reduce x-risk. I get this thinking, but I hope we don’t bring non-human animals. As I say in the post, it seems safer to make them go extinct.
On discounting, uncertainty over future discount rates (perhaps due to uncertainty about future x-risk which may become lower than it is now) leads to a declining discount rate over time and the result that we should discount the longterm future as if we were in the safest world among those we find plausible. This is known as Weitzman discounting. From Greaves’ paper Discounting for Public Policy:
Therefore we can’t really wave away the very long-term future, assuming of course that Weitzman is correct (he may not be, see the “Weitzman-Gollier puzzle”).