People like Bostrom have thoroughly considered how valuable the future might be. The view in existential risk reduction circles is simply that the future has positive expected value on likely moral systems. There are a bunch of arguments for this. One can argue from improvements to welfare, decreases in war, emergency of more egalitarian movements over time, anticipated disappearance of scarcity, and reliance on factory farming, increasing societal wisdom over time, and dozens of other reasons. One way of thinking about this if you are a symmetric utilitarian is that we don’t have much reason to think either of pain and pleasure is more energy efficient than the other (https://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2012/03/are-pain-and-pleasure-equally-energy.html)[Are pain and please equally energy efficient]. Since a singleton would be correlated with some relevant values, it should produce much more pleasure than pain, so the future should have very net positive values. I think that to the extent that we can research this question, we can sit very confidently saying that for usual value systems, the future has positive expectation.
The reason that I think people tend to try to shy away from public debates on this topic, such as when arguing for the value of existential risk research, is that doing so might risk creating a false equivalence between themselves and very destructive positions, which would be very harmful.
People like Bostrom have thoroughly considered how valuable the future might be. The view in existential risk reduction circles is simply that the future has positive expected value on likely moral systems. There are a bunch of arguments for this. One can argue from improvements to welfare, decreases in war, emergency of more egalitarian movements over time, anticipated disappearance of scarcity, and reliance on factory farming, increasing societal wisdom over time, and dozens of other reasons. One way of thinking about this if you are a symmetric utilitarian is that we don’t have much reason to think either of pain and pleasure is more energy efficient than the other (https://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2012/03/are-pain-and-pleasure-equally-energy.html)[Are pain and please equally energy efficient]. Since a singleton would be correlated with some relevant values, it should produce much more pleasure than pain, so the future should have very net positive values. I think that to the extent that we can research this question, we can sit very confidently saying that for usual value systems, the future has positive expectation.
The reason that I think people tend to try to shy away from public debates on this topic, such as when arguing for the value of existential risk research, is that doing so might risk creating a false equivalence between themselves and very destructive positions, which would be very harmful.