I agree on the point about non-human animals, but I guess if we should account for future beings too. 1k years ago, we had not fully realised how much humanity (or post-humanity) could flourish, because it was not clear settling the galaxy etc. was possible, so I think the utility of the future has increased a lot in expectation (as long as you think the future is positive). If we decrease existential risk, we can increase it even further. In other words:
The world is awful, because existential risk is quite high.
The world is much better, because we have realised vast flourishing is possible.
The world can be much better, because we can decrease existential risk.
I think the future is not clearly positive if we also consider non-human animals (and digital people and animals). I think realising colonizing the galaxy could be a bad things: For example, by spreading wild animal suffering and factory farming.
Fair enough! I agree with Saulius that digital minds might be much more important than WAW in the future. I see you wrote about why the expected numbers of farmed animals in the far future might be huge. I have only read the summary of your piece (added it to my reading list now), but I agree that “digital people will, presumably, have very few incentive to raise animals for food, or even other purposes”. In addition, I think there are scenarions in which digital beings dominate total utility by many many orders of magnitude (OOMs), whereas I find it hard to imagine wild animal welfare dominating by much more than the current 8 OOMs (roughly my best guess).
Hi Fai,
I agree on the point about non-human animals, but I guess if we should account for future beings too. 1k years ago, we had not fully realised how much humanity (or post-humanity) could flourish, because it was not clear settling the galaxy etc. was possible, so I think the utility of the future has increased a lot in expectation (as long as you think the future is positive). If we decrease existential risk, we can increase it even further. In other words:
The world is awful, because existential risk is quite high.
The world is much better, because we have realised vast flourishing is possible.
The world can be much better, because we can decrease existential risk.
Thank you for your reply!
I think the future is not clearly positive if we also consider non-human animals (and digital people and animals). I think realising colonizing the galaxy could be a bad things: For example, by spreading wild animal suffering and factory farming.
Fair enough! I agree with Saulius that digital minds might be much more important than WAW in the future. I see you wrote about why the expected numbers of farmed animals in the far future might be huge. I have only read the summary of your piece (added it to my reading list now), but I agree that “digital people will, presumably, have very few incentive to raise animals for food, or even other purposes”. In addition, I think there are scenarions in which digital beings dominate total utility by many many orders of magnitude (OOMs), whereas I find it hard to imagine wild animal welfare dominating by much more than the current 8 OOMs (roughly my best guess).