I’m am on a gap year from studying for a Master of Social Entrepreneurship degree at the University of Southern California.
I have thought along EA lines for as long as I can remember, and I recently wrote the first draft of a book “Ways to Save The World” about my top innovative ideas for broad approaches to reduce existential risk.
I am now doing more research on how these approaches interact with AI X-risk.
Fantastic news!!! My main question:
The Future Fund AI Worldview Prize had specific, very bold criteria, such as raising or lowering to certain thresholds the probability estimates of transformative AI timelines or probabilities of an AI related catastrophe, given certain timelines;
Will this AI Worldview Prize have very similar criteria, or do you have any intuitions what these criteria might be?
This would be very helpful for researchers like myself deciding whether to continue on a particular line of research!
Opportunity Cost Ethics
“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
~Voltaire
Opportunity Cost Ethics is a term I invented to capture the ethical view that failing to do good ought to carry the same moral weight as doing harm.
You could say that in Opportunity Cost Ethics, sins of omission are equivalent to sins of commission.
In this view, if you walk by a child drowning in a pond, and there is zero cost to you to saving the child, it would be equally morally inexcusable for you not to save the child from drowning as it would be to take a non-drowning child and drown them in the pond.
Moreover, if you have good reasons to suspect there are massive opportunities to do good, such as a reasonable probability you could save millions of lives, Opportunity Cost Ethics states that the moral thing to do is to seek out such opportunities and find the best possible opportunities, after accounting for search costs.
Opportunity Cost Ethics is a consequentialist ethical theory, as it states the only morally relevant fact is the ultimate effect of our actions or non-actions.
The strongest version of Opportunity Cost Ethics, which I hold, states that:
“The best moral action at any given time requires considering as many actions as possible, until marginal search costs exceed the expected value of finding better options; at which point an optimal stopping point has been reached. Considerations of proximity also need to be taken into account.”
We could call the above “Strong Opportunity Cost Ethics.”
Possibly the most important implication of Opportunity Cost Ethics is that we should spend a massive amount of time, energy, and resources trying to determine what the best possible actions we can take are.
It is very difficult to know how much time we should spend trying to figure how good various actions are, and how certain we should be before we act. Opportunity Cost Ethics states that it is morally right to continue searching for the best action you can take until you predict the marginal cost of searching for a better action outweighs the amount of additional good that the better action would achieve.
Due to its obvious importance I assume something like this already exists, if so please point me to it, thank!
edit: Forum user tc pointed out that the “doing / allowing” distinction in ethics, whether causing harm is equivalent to preventing harm, which inspired trolley dilemmas, is highly relevant.
This is the kind of thing I was looking for! I am, however, uncertain if it fully captures what I am saying, which is more about the potential to do a massive amount of good, and the ethical responsibility to seek out such opportunities if we suspect they are available and the search costs do not cancel out the good.
At some point I hope to extend this short-form into a more well-formed robust theory.
I agree this seems like a huge problem. I noticed that even though I am extremely committed to longtermism and have been for many years, the fact that I am skeptical of AI risk seems to significantly decrease my status in longtermist circles, there is a significant isularity and resistance to EA gospel being criticized, and little support for those seeking to do so
Hey everyone! Just joined EA a few months ago and was very fortunate to attend EAGx Bostone recently! I could not be more excited about discovering this community!!!
I’m doing two fellowships and working on a marketing project team in my university EA USC group.
I feel very strongly about utilitarianism, am interested in physics, and as a result came to longtermism several years ago on my own. I actually wrote a book called “Ways to Save The World” essentially about innovative broad strategies to sustainably, systemically reduce existntial risk. Really excited to share it with the EA community and have my ideas challenged and improved by fellow highly intelligent, rational do-gooders!
I love this post! Solarpunk was my first intuition as well, I think there is a lot of good evidence that green and natural environments support happiness and productivity, and so I don’t think it is actually out of alignment with utilitarianism or EA at all.
I have a theory of reality which makes aesthetics the fundamental force of the universe. To demonstrate this, if effective altruism is successful in colonizing space and ends up determining the shape of the future of the universe, then this “shape” will be whatever aesthetic shape we have determined creates maximum utility.
I think aesthetics is a much better fundamental for utilitarianism than pleasure, which intuitively seems quite base and basic. Therefore, I agree that aesthetics are exceedingly important in figuring out what future we want to create.
Anyone else ever feel a strong discordance between emotional response and cognitive worldview when it comes to EA issues?
Like emotionally I’m like “save the animals! All animals deserve love and protection and we should make sure they can all thrive and be happy with autonomy and evolve toward more intelligent species so we can live together in a diverse human animal utopia, yay big tent EA…”
But logically I’m like “AI and/or other exponential technologies are right around the corner and make animal issues completely immaterial. Anything that detracts from progress on that is a distraction and should be completely and deliberately ignored. Optimally we will build an AI or other system that determines maximum utility per unit of matter, possibly including agency as a factor and quite possibly not, so that we can tile the universe with sentient simulations of whatever the answer is.”
OR, a similar discordance between what was just described and the view that we should also co-optimize for agency, diversity of values and experience, fun, decentralization, etc., EVEN IF that means possibly locking in a state of ~99.9999+percent of possible utility unrealized.
Very frustrating, I usually try to push myself toward my rational conclusion of what is best with a wide girth for uncertainty and epistemic humility, but it feels depressing, painful, and self-de-humanizing to do so.