Most people have a strong drive to perpetuate humanity. What makes EAs special is that EAs also care about others' suffering. So EAs should focus on trying to make sure the future isn't full of suffering.

The value of the future conditional on civilization surviving seems positive to me, but not robustly so. I think the main argument for its being positive is theoretical (e.g., Spreading happiness to the stars seems little harder than just spreading), but the historical/contemporary record is ambiguous.

The value of improving the future seems more robustly positive if it is tractable. I suspect it is not that much less tractable than extinction risk work. I think a lot of AI risk satisfies this goal as well as the x-risk goal for reasons Will MacAskill gives in What We Owe the Future. Understanding, developing direct interventions for, and designing political processes for digital minds seem like plausible candidates. Some work on how to design democratic institutions in the age of AI also seems plausibly tractable enough to compete with extinction risk.

Avoiding extinction seems bad to me if we never get our shit together morally-civilizationally, and good otherwise. Conditional on survival, I'm not sure of the likelihood of us getting our shit together to be a force of good in the universe, mostly because I'm uncertain how AGI will play out.

If we treat digital minds like current animal livestock, the expected value of the future could be really bad. 

I think people overrate how predictable the effect of our actions on the future will be (even though they rate it very low in absolute terms); extinction seem like one of the very few (only?) things that seems like its effects will endure throughout a big part of the future. Still buy the theory that 0-1% of possible value is equally valuable to 98-99%; just about tractability

Far from convinced that continued existence at currently likely wellbeing levels is a good thing

Extinction is not so bad in comparison to futures where the world possibly has lots of intense suffering. We should focus resources on preventing suffering and ensuring wellbeing.

A couple of things:

Even for non-negative utilitarians, I think the marginal value of working on reducing extinction risks on its own is much less than is generally currently believed.

One crux is whether we assume that the future is likely to be high-value as it is. A core claim of those who think working on extinction risks is the most important is that we are very likely to have a high-value future. For many reasons, I am skeptical of this claim. While one may argue that we are making progress in including more beings in our moral circles, we've arguably ... (read more)

I'm leaning to disagree because existential risks are a lot broader than extinction risk.

If the question replaced 'extinction' with 'existential' and 'survive' with 'thrive' (retain most value of the future), I would lean towards agree!

I'm a negative utilitarian, meaning I believe reducing suffering is the only thing that truly matters. Other things are important only in so far as they help to reduce suffering. I'm open to debate on this ethical view.

Given this premise:

• There's nothing bad about extinction itself.
• There is, however, a lot of bad if we live in a future full of suffering.

Therefore, we should focus on increasing the quality of of life of living beings, rather than simply prolong our existence.

More tractable, necessary precondition 

I think there are a lot of thorny definitional issues here that make this set of issues not boil down that nicely to a 1D spectrum. But overall extinction prevention will likely have a far broader coalition supporting it, while making the future large and amazing is far less popular since most people aren't very ambitious with respect to spreading flourishing through the universe, but I tentatively am.

This is a difficult one, and both my thoughts and my justifications (especially the few sources I cite) are very incomplete. 

It seems to me for now that existential risk reduction is likely to be negative, as both human and AI-controlled futures could contain immense orders of magnitude more suffering than the current world (and technological developments could also enable more intense suffering, whether in humans or in digital minds). The most salient ethical problems with the extinction of earth-originating intelligent life seem to be the likelihood... (read more)

I'm optimistic about the very best value-increasing research/interventions. But in terms of what would actually be done at the margin, most work that people would do for "value-increasing" reasons would be confused/doomed, I expect (and this is less true for AI safety).

I roughly feel more comfortable passing the responsibility onto wiser successors. I still like the "positive vs negative longtermism" framework, I think positive longtermism (increasing the value of futures where we survive) risks value lock-in too much. Negative longtermism is a clear cut responsibility with no real downside unless you're presented with a really tortured example about spending currently existing lives to buy future lives or something. 

mostly because of tractability than any other reason

It's a tractability issue. In order for these interventions to be worth funding, they should reduce our chance of extinction not just now, but over the long term. And I just haven't seen many examples of projects that seem likely to do that.

Very worried about AI risk, think short timelines are plausible

I think the expected value of the long-term future, in the “business as usual” scenario, is positive. In particular, I anticipate that advanced/transformative artificial intelligence drives technological innovation to solve a lot of world problems (e.g., helping create cell-based meat eventually), and I also think a decent amount of this EV is contained in futures with digital minds and/or space colonization (even though I’d guess it’s unlikely we get to that sort of world). However, I’m very uncertain about these futures—they could just as easily contain ... (read more)

Question seems like a false dichotomy.
For example, Democracy promotion sure seems super important right now and that would help both described causes (and it isn't clear which would be helped more). 

On the current margin, improving our odds of survival seems much more crucial to the long-term value of civilization. My reason for believing this is that there are some dangerous technologies which I expect will be invented soon, and are more likely to lead to extinction in their early years than later on. Therefore, we should currently spend more effort on ensuring survival, because we will have more time to improve the value of the future after that.

(Counterpoint: ASI is the main technology that might lead to extinction, and the period when it's invented might be equally front-loaded in terms of setting values as it is in terms of extinction risk.)

Depends, if x-risk is small (<5%) and if we expect outsized impact on the future (preventing negative value lock-ins), then the latter seems more important. I'm very unsure about both. 

I have mixed feelings here. But one major practical worry I have about "increasing the value of futures" is that a lot of that looks fairly zero-sum to me. And I'm scared of getting other communities to think this way. 

If we can capture 5% more of the universe for utilitarian aims, for example, that's 5% less from others. 

I think it makes sense for a lot of this to be studied in private, but am less sure about highly public work.

If we had any way of tractably doing anything with future AI systems, I might think there was something meaningful to talk about for "futures where we survive."

See my post here arguing against that tractability.

The salient question for me is how much does reducing extinction risk change the long run experience of moral patients? One argument is that meaningfully reducing risk would require substantial coordination, and that coordination is likely to result in better worlds. I think it is as or more likely that reducing extinction risk can result in some worlds where most moral patients are used as means without regard to their suffering.

I think an AI aligned to roughly to the output of all current human coordination would be net-negative. I would shift to thinkin... (read more)

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 ab... (read more)

Partly this is because I think “extinction” as defined here is very unlikely (<<1%) to happen this century, which upper bounds the scale of the area. I think most “existential risk” work is not squarely targeted at avoiding literal extinction of all Earth-originating life.

I feel extremely unsure about this one. I'm voting slightly against purely from the perspective of, "wow, there are projects in that direction that feel super neglected".

I dunno, by how much? Seems contingent on lots of factors. 

I think that without knowing people's assessment of extinction risk (e.g. chance of extinction over the next 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 years)^[1], the answers here don't provide a lot of information value. 

I think a lot of people on the disagree side would change their mind if they believed (as I do) that there is a >50% chance of extinction in the next 5 years (absent further intervention).

Would be good if there was a short survey to establish such background assumptions to people's votes.

1. ^{^}

   And their assessment of the chance that AI successors will be mora

Nonexistence is preferable to intense suffering, and I think there are enough S-risks associated with the array of possible futures ahead of us that we should prioritize reducing S-risks over X-risks, except when reducing X-risks is instrumental to reducing S-risks. So to be specific, I would only agree with this to the extent that "value" == lack of suffering -- I do not think we should build for the utopia that might not come to pass because we wipe ourselves out first, just that it is vastly more important to prevent dystopia 

The long-running future seems like it could well be unacceptably awful. From the perspective of a battery hen, it would seem much better that it's distant ancestors were pushed out of an ecological niche before humanity domesticated them. Throwing all our effort into X-risk mitigation without really tackling S-risks in a world of increasing lock-in across domains seems deeply unwise to me. 

I find it very difficult to determine whether the future will be net-negative or net-positive (when considering humans, factory-farmed animals, wild animals, and possibly artificial sentience). 
This makes it very hard to know whether work on extinction reduction is likely to be positive or not.
I prefer to work on things that aim to move the sign towards "net-positive".

Survival feels like a very low bar to me. 

Survival could mean the permanent perpetuation of extreme suffering, human disempowerment, or any number of losses of our civilization's potential.

I am skeptical being able to reduce at all our chance of extinction but I am confident we can reduce suffering while we are here

Intelligence is the only chance of some redemption to the massive suffering probably associated to the emergence of consciousness. 

This is the age of danger, we are the first species on Earth that has figured out morality, so we shall survive at allmost all cost. 

It seems even more important to avoid futures full of extreme suffering than to avoid extinction.

I really don't have a strong view, but I find myself sympathetic to the idea that the world is not great and is getting worse (if you consider non-human animals).

By reducing the chances of our extinction, we could solve other threats, such as virus control, nuclear weapons, animal preservation & welfare, and looking into more sustainable ways of living, that have less impact on our habitat. We need to take care of the home we have today.

Survival doesn't in and of itself amount to a meaningful life. Generally, there ought to be a sweet spot between the two. If taken to the extreme, all resources that do not contribute to the subsistence of life is wasted. I don't agree that we ought to live that way, and I think most people would support that conclusion.

This is just an intuition of mine, and not thoroughly researched, but it seems to me that if we consider all sentient beings, there are many possible futures in which the average well-being would be below neutral, and some of them, especially for non-human animals, would be quite easily preventable. This leads me to believe that marginal resources are currently better invested in preventing future suffering than in reducing the risk of extinction.

I lean toward more work on improving conditions if we survive, but noting that you have to survive to benefit.

Averse to uncertainty (but oh well can that be defined)

Tepidly disagree — I think the technological developments, like AI, which would raise the spectre of extinction are far more contingent than we would like to believe.

Yes, because it seems like extinction or near-extinction is a major possibility.

Given cluelessness, it seems waaay less robust and likely to succeed in pulling off a trajectory shift 

If we go extinct, it doesn't matter how much value we get. We don't exist to appreciate it.

If we don't go extinct, it probably means we have enough "value" (we survived, it means we had and have food and shelter) and probably we can have math proofs how to make AI agents safe. Now after the main extinction event (probably AI agentic explosion) is in the past, we can work on increasing the value of futures.

I'm anti-natalist and don't believe that human extinction is necessarily a 'bad' thing. I believe it's more important to make people happier than to make more happy people. 

p(doom in 20 years) ~= 0.005

I think he have relatively more leverage over probability of near-term extinction than the value of the entire post-counterfactual-extinction future

Reducing x risk is much less tractable than EAs think

Not sure that existence is net positive in expectation, but improving futures seems more robust!

I'm not convinced that a marginal resource, especilly a funder, can move the needle on existential risk to a degree greater than or equivalent to the positive change that same resource would have on reducing suffering today. 

Naively, I am assuming that extinction risks are relatively high (1/6 was Ord's take in The Precipice?), and if it happens, than there's 0 futures with 0 value.

Tractability + something-like-epistemic-humility feel like cruxes for me, I'm surprised they haven't been discussed much; preventing extinction is good by most lights, specific interventions to improve the future are much less clearly good, and I feel much more confused about what would have lasting effects.

I prefer work on extinction risk. Preventing near-term extinction risks seems more tractable than improving the value of the long-term future in other ways since short-term consequences are generally more predictable than long-term consequences. 

I think there are already tons of really smart people working full time on making the futures where we survive more valuable. I think the likeliest existential and catastrophic risks are relatively neglected

Essentially the Brian Kateman view: civilisation's valence seems massively negative due to farmed animal suffering. This is only getting worse despite people being able to change right now. There's a very significant chance that people will continue to prefer animal meat, even if cultured meat is competitive on price etc. "Astronomical suffering" is a real concern.

I have to push back against the premise, as the dichotomoy seems a bit too forced. There are different ways to ensure survival, such as billionaires building survival shelters and hoarding resources vs. collective international efforts to solve our biggest problems. Working on better futures also usually involves creating more resilient institutions that will be better suited towards preventing extinction; we don't just magically pop into a future.

The big reason I lean towards disagreeing nowadays is coming to the belief that I expect the AI control/alignment problem to be much less neglected and important to solve, and more generally I've come to doubt the assumption that worlds in which we survive are worlds in which we achieve very large value (under my own value set), such that reducing existential risk is automatically good.

The world is pretty good, and the future can be better, if we get the chance to make it so.

We can adjust the risk per unit of reward or the reward per unit of risk. 

In the absence of credible, near-term, high-likelihood existential risks and in the absence of being path-locked on an existential trajectory, I would rather adjust the reward per unit of risk. 

I also suspect that the most desirable paths to improving the value of futures where we survive will come with a host of advancements that allow us to more effectively combat risks anyway. Yes, I'm sure there are some really dumb ways to improve the value of futures, such that we're ... (read more)

Our lightcone is an enormous endowment. We get to have a lot of computation, in a universe with simple physics. What these resources are spent on matters a lot.

If we get AI right (create a CEV-aligned ASI), we get most of the utility out of these resources automatically (almost tautologically, see CEV: to the extent after considering all the arguments and reflecting we think we're ought to value something, this is what CEV points to as an optimization target). If it takes us a long time to get AI right, we lose a literal galaxy of resources every year, but... (read more)

I buy into MacAskill's argument that the 20th-21st centuries appear to be an era of heightened existential risk, and that if we can survive the development of nuclear, AI and engineered biology technologies there will be more time in the future to increase the value where we survive. 

neglectedness of the latter outweighing increased tractability of the former

Extinction being bad assumes that our existence in the future is a net positive. There's the possibility for existence to be net negative, in which case extinction is more like a zero point.

On the one hand, negativity bias means that all other things being equal, suffering tends to outweigh equal happiness. On the other hand, there's a kind of progress bias where sentient actors in the world tend to seek happiness and avoid suffering and gradually make the world better.

Thus, if you're at all optimistic that progress is possible, you'd probably assume that ... (read more)

X-risk reduction (especially alinement) is highly neglected and it's less clear how our actions can impact the value of the future. However, I think the impact of both is very uncertain and I still think working on s-risk reduction and long-termest animal work is of high impact.