Overall I care more about preventing the worst scenarios than promoting the very best. While I am worried about scenarios worse than extinction, and most of my ambivalence comes from the possibility of these, I would count extinction as a scenario that I care about substantially more about than bringing about very positive futures.
While there’s less work on improving the longer term future, I also find what work there is not that promising by comparison to the preventing extinction work—and the longer we survive, the more likely I find it that we are able to have the abundance required for conflicts of values to be very cheap to resolve.
While I can’t bring myself to lean very far because of the scenarios worse than extinction, and possibility of harder to coordinate futures in which very bad things can continue somewhere basically indefinitely, preventing extinction still seems more important than much of the work towards improving futures right now, and far more actionable than the rest.
Overall I care more about preventing the worst scenarios than promoting the very best. While I am worried about scenarios worse than extinction, and most of my ambivalence comes from the possibility of these, I would count extinction as a scenario that I care about substantially more about than bringing about very positive futures.
While there’s less work on improving the longer term future, I also find what work there is not that promising by comparison to the preventing extinction work—and the longer we survive, the more likely I find it that we are able to have the abundance required for conflicts of values to be very cheap to resolve.
While I can’t bring myself to lean very far because of the scenarios worse than extinction, and possibility of harder to coordinate futures in which very bad things can continue somewhere basically indefinitely, preventing extinction still seems more important than much of the work towards improving futures right now, and far more actionable than the rest.