Crossposted to Less Wrong
‘Like most of life’s dangers, the dangers of artificial intelligence are not easily identified from the armchair.’
J Dmitri Gallow
Epistemic status
I’m not an expert in this field, and herein I make some sweeping generalisations educated guesses about the overall...
TL;DR: EA has traditionally deprioritized climate change as a cause area. But a new report from Rethink Priorities, an EA research institute, suggests that specific Earth systems risks driven by climate change could have mortality impacts comparable to major global health burdens, on top of the known damages of climate change.
The report finds that research and governance work on ‘Earth Systems Stabilization’ to establish whether safe options to address th...
Could you elaborate further what you have in mind with a moral cluelessness response?
Personally, I’ll say that most of those supposed anti-consequentialist thought experiments are helpful for illustrating why you need to be thoughtful when applying consequentialism (as is the case with every moral framework), but they do nothing to refute consequentialism. For example, there are many perfectly good utilitarian reasons to not conduct organ harvesting, such as threatening trust in institutions, risking your ability to do good in the future, the fact that you are considering that option suggests you might be suffering from delusion or some other problem which impairs your ability to assess the likelihood of being discovered or the benefits of harvesting the organs, etc.