It seems like considering the Better Futrues perspective gets us some of the way back to ‘normie’/​intuitive ethics, compared to traditional X-risks-trump-everything views. E.g. promoting peace and democracy and good governance and so forth seem important from a BF perspective, and more akin to what pre-theoretically we would think is good.
I’m not sure what to make of this—in a sense it is good to be less controversial and have more common ground with mainstream folks, but it is also perhaps suspicious.
I’m commenting late, but I don’t think the better futures perspective gets us back to intuitive/​normie ethical views, because what is a better future has far more variation in values than preventing catastrophic outcomes (I’m making an empirical claim that most human values have more convergence in things they want to avoid than in things they want to seek out/​are positive), and the other issue is that to a large extent, AGI/​ASI in the medium/​long-term is very totalizing in its effects, meaning that basically the only thing that matters is getting a friendly ASI to you, and thus promoting peace/​democracy don’t matter, while good governance can actually matter (though it’d have to be way more specific than what Will MacAskill defines as good governance.)
It seems like considering the Better Futrues perspective gets us some of the way back to ‘normie’/​intuitive ethics, compared to traditional X-risks-trump-everything views. E.g. promoting peace and democracy and good governance and so forth seem important from a BF perspective, and more akin to what pre-theoretically we would think is good.
I’m not sure what to make of this—in a sense it is good to be less controversial and have more common ground with mainstream folks, but it is also perhaps suspicious.
I’m commenting late, but I don’t think the better futures perspective gets us back to intuitive/​normie ethical views, because what is a better future has far more variation in values than preventing catastrophic outcomes (I’m making an empirical claim that most human values have more convergence in things they want to avoid than in things they want to seek out/​are positive), and the other issue is that to a large extent, AGI/​ASI in the medium/​long-term is very totalizing in its effects, meaning that basically the only thing that matters is getting a friendly ASI to you, and thus promoting peace/​democracy don’t matter, while good governance can actually matter (though it’d have to be way more specific than what Will MacAskill defines as good governance.)