Discussion Thread: Existential Choices Debate Week

I don't think this is as clear of a dichotomy as people think it is. A lot of global catastrophic risk doesn't come from literal extinction because human extinction is very hard. A lot of mundane work on GCR policy involves a wide variety of threat models that are not just extinction.

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.

To some extent I reject the question as not-super-action-guiding (I think that a lot of work people do has impacts on both things).

But taking it at face value, I think that AI x-risk is almost all about increasing the value of futures where "we" survive (even if all the humans die), and deserves most attention. Literal extinction of earth-originating intelligence is mostly a risk from future war, which I do think deserves some real attention, but isn't the main priority right now.

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.

I don't think it's valuable to ensure future moral patients exist for their own sake, and extinction risk reduction only really seems to expectably benefit humans who would otherwise die in an extinction event, who would be in the billions. An astronomical number of future moral patients could have welfare at stake if we don't go extinct, so I'd prioritize them on the basis of their numbers.

See this comment and thread.

I agreed, but mostly because of my unfortunately-dim view of the tractability of work increasing the value of futures where we survive.

I genuinely have no idea. 

Footnote 2 completely changes the meaning of the statement from common sense interpretations of the statement. It makes it so that e.g. a future scenario in which AI takes over and causes existential catastrophe and the extinction of biological humans this century does not count as extinction, so long as the AI continues to exist. As such, I chose to ignore it with my "fairly strongly agree" answer.

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 increasing the value of good futures is probably higher importance, but much less tractable

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

People in general, and not just longtermist altruists, have reason to be concerned with extinction. It may turn out not to be a problem or not be solvable and so the marginal impact seems questionable here. In contrast, few people are thinking about how to navigate our way to a worthwhile future. There are many places where thoughtful people might influence decisions that effectively lock us into a trajectory.

I think "increasing value of futures where we survive" is broad enough that plenty of non-EA stuff like just foreign aid or governance reform stuff generally would count and X-Risk stuff is very specific and niche.

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

Two major reasons/ considerations:
1- I'm unconvinced of the tractability of non-extinction-risk reducing longtermist interventions. 
2- Perhaps this is self-defeating - but I feel uncomfortable substantively shaping the future in ways that aren't merely making sure it exists. Visions of the future that I would have found un-objectionable a century ago would probably seem bad to me today. In short - this consideration is basically "moral uncertainty". I think extinction-risk reduction is, though not recommended on every moral framework, at least recommended on most. I haven't seen other ideas for shaping the future which are as widely recommended. 

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 still not reached a state where we've even reached parity in terms of welfare, particularly if we include non-human animals. To claim the future is very likely to be high-value, particularly to the extent that some anti-X-risk individuals claim, is fairly ungrounded.

As someone who is sympathetic to a form of negative utilitarianism and anti-frustrationism, I think that the lack of creation of value is generally secondary to the reduction or prevention of suffering.

Many very rich and highly influential people are very concerned about extinction risks. Aside from the problematicity of such individuals being an overwhelming source of funding for movements like EA, it would suggest that extinction risks are less neglected than suffering risks. For reference, Animal Advocacy Careers has reported that the global annual level of funding for farmed animal advocacy is <200 million USD.

I only leave 1 unit away from being the most towards valuing futures where we survive because of uncertainty that I might be highly wrong about something, whether it's my ethical framework or about marginal value of working on extinction risks.

Some caveats:

I find some of the more extreme claims or theories from individuals and groups concerned with S-risks to be implausible, and I personally think pursuing some of these directions is not an effective use of time and resources. Ditto for X-risk claims.

I think there are deeper systemic issues (e.g. current instantiations of capitalism/neoliberalism) which are driving us towards both higher extinction risk and higher levels and expected levels of suffering. This is what I am personally driven towards focusing on, and not coincidentally, I think we need more focus of this sort.

May add more later.

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.

Recent advances in LLMs have led me to update toward believing that we live in the world where alignment is easy (i.e. CEV naturally emerge from LLMs, and future AI agents will be based on understanding and following natural language commands by default), but governance is hard (i.e. AI agents might be co-opted by governments or corporations to lock in humanity in a dystopian future, and the current geopolitical environment, characterized by democratic backsliding, cold war mongering, and an increase in military conflicts including wars of aggression, isn't conducive to robust multilateral governance).

The far future, on our current trajectory, seems net negative on average. Reducing extinction risk just multiplies its negative EV. 

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 of biological suffering continuing on earth for millions of years (though it's not clear to me whether it would be more or less intense without intelligent life on earth), and the possibility of space (and eventually earth) being colonized by aliens (though whether their values will be better or worse remains an open question in my view).

Another point (which I'm not certain about how to weigh in my considerations) is that certain extinction events could massively reduce suffering on earth, by preventing digital sentience or even by causing the end of biological sentient life (this seems unlikely, and I've asked here how likely or unlikely EAs thought this was).

However, I am very uncertain of the tractability of improving future outcomes, especially considering recent posts by researchers at the Center on Long-Term Risk, or this one by a former researcher there, highlighting how uncertain it is that we are well-placed to improve the future. Nonetheless, I think that efforts made to improve the future, like the work of the Center for Reducing Suffering, the Center on Long-Term Risk, or the Sentience Institute, advocate for important values and could have some positive flow-through effects in the medium-term (though I don't necessarily think that this robustly improves the longer term future). I will note, however, that I am biased since work related the Center for Reducing Suffering was the primary reason I got into EA.

I am very open to changing my mind on this, but for now I'm under 50% agree because it seems to me that, in short:

1. Extinction Risk Reduction could very well have negative expected value.
2. Efforts to improve the value of futures where we survive might have some moderate positive effects in the short-term.

Lots of uncertainties. I expect to have moved my cursor before the end of the week!

Under moral uncertainty, many moral perspectives care much more about averting downsides than producing upsides.

Additionally, tractability is probably higher for extinction-level threats, since they are "absorptive"; decreasing the chance we end up in one gives humanity and their descendants ability to do whatever they figure out is best.

Finally, there is a meaningful sense in which working on improving the future is plagued by questions about moral progress and lock-in of values, and my intuition is that most interventions that take moral progress seriously and try to avoid lock-in boil down to working on things that are fairly equivalent to avoiding extinction. Interventions that don't take moral progress seriously instead may look like locking in current values.

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

In my view, the extinction of all Earth-originating intelligent life (including AIs) seems extremely unlikely over the next several decades. While a longtermist utilitarian framework takes even a 0.01 percentage point reduction in extinction risk quite seriously, there appear to be very few plausible ways that all intelligent life originating from Earth could go extinct in the next century. Ensuring a positive transition to artificial life seems more useful on current margins.

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 a large amount of suffering. And if we don’t get to those futures, I’m worried about wild animal suffering being high in the meantime. Separately, I’m not sure addressing a lot of s-risk scenarios right now is particularly tractable (nor, more imminently, does wild animal suffering seem awfully tractable to me). 

Probably the biggest reason I’m so close to the center is I think a significant amount of existential risk from AI looks like disempowering humanity without killing literally every human, and hence, I view AI alignment work as at least partially serving the goal of “increasing the value of futures where we survive.”

More tractable, necessary precondition 

I think humans will go extinct at some point, so reducing extinction risk just kicks the can down the road. 

On a selfish level, I don't want humans to go extinct anytime soon. But on an impartial level, I don't care really care whether humans go extinct, say, 500 years from now vs 600. I don't subscribe to the Total View of population ethics so I don't place moral value on the "possible lives that could have existed" in those extra 100 years. 

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).

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.

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.

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".

This is a question I could easily change my mind on.

The experience of digital minds seems to dominate far future calculations. We can get a lot of value from this, a lot of disvalue, or anything in between.

If we go extinct then we get 0 value from digital minds. This seems bad, but we also avoid the futures where we create them and they suffer. It’s hard to say if we are on track to creating them to flourish or suffer - I think there are arguments on both sides. The futures where we create digital minds may be the ones where we wanted to “use” them, which could mean them suffering. Alternatively, we have seen our moral circle expand over time and this may continue, so there is a real possibility we could create them to flourish. I don’t have a clear view which side wins here, so overall going extinct doesn’t seem obviously terrible to me.

We could instead focus on raising the moral status of digital minds, our ability to understand sentience and consciousness, improve societal values, making sure AI goes well and helps us with these things. These robustly increase the expected value of digital sentience in futures where we survive. 

So because reducing extinction risk is close to 0 expected value to me, and increasing the value of futures where we survive is robustly positive in expected value, I lean towards increasing the value of futures where we survive.

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.

If we avoid extinction, plenty of people will have the time to take care of humanity's future. I'll leave it to them. Both topic have a lot of common ground anyway, like "not messing up with the biosphere" or "keeping control of ASI"

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. 

Roughly buy that there is more "alpha" in making the future better because most people are not longtermist but most people do want to avoid extinction. 

Intuitively, I don't see the point to perpetuate humanity if it's with life full of suffering. 
 After reading arguments on the other side, feel much more uncertain. 
Indeed, it will be hard to fix value issues without any humans (based on the fact that we are the only species that think about moral issues)

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). 

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).

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

I think human extinction (from ASI) is highly likely to happen, and soon, unless we stop it from being built^[1]

See my comments in the Symposium for further discussion

1. ^{^}

   And that the ASI that wipes us out won't matter morally (to address footnote 2 on the statement)

Broadly Agree

Although I might have misunderstood and missed the point of this entire debate, so correct me if that is the case

I just don't believe  changing the future trajectory is tractable in say 50-100 years from now areas like politics, economics, AI welfare etc. I think its a pipe dream. We cannot predict technological, political and economic changes even in the medium term future. These changes may well quickly render our current efforts meaningless in 10-20 years. I think the effect of work we do now which is future focused diminishes in value exponentially to the point that in 20 years time it is probably almost meaningless. I could be convinced against this if you could show me interventions 20 years ago which were specifically future focus which are now still meaningful.

However I do believe it may be possible to reduce existential risk through direct, tangeble changes now which could prevent a disastrous one off event like a engnieered virus or AI apocalypse. Stopping a one off catastrophe though still exremely difficult seems much more realistic than influencing an overall global trajectory with so much uncertainty.

This is unless you include general global health and development and animal welfare work which directly improves the lives of beings today, and will also likely improve beings lives in the future but probably in a far more minor way than this question is addressing. If you include the effects ofstandard EA GHD and animal welfare work under the banner "Improving the value of futures where we survive" then I would probably swing my vote the other way.

It seems plausible to me we might be approaching a "time of perils' where total x-risk is unacceptably high and will continue to be as we develop powerful AI systems, but might decrease later since we can use AI systems to tackle x-risk (though that seems hard and risky in its own myriad ways).

Broadly think we should still prioritise avoiding catastrophes in this phase, and bet on being able to steer later but low confidence.

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 thinking addressing extinction risk is more important if factory farming stopped, humanity was taking serious steps to address wild animal suffering, all sustainable development goals were met within 5 years of the initial timeline, and global inequality was reduced to something like <0.25 GINI coefficient.

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 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 morally valuable, as per footnote 2 of the statement.

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.

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

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.)

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".

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.

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 this is approximately nothing in relative terms.

If we die because of AI, we get ~0% of the possible value/max CEV.

Increasing the chance AI goes well is what's important. Work to marginally shift the % around the maximum seems relatively unimportant compared to the chance AI goes well. Whether we die because of AI is the largest input.

(I find negative % of CEV very implausible because it almost always doesn't make sense to spend resources on penalizing other agent's utility if the other agent is smart enough to make it not worth it and for other, more speculative reasons.)

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.

I misinterpreted the prompt initially. The answer is much more ambiguous to me now, especially due to the overlap between x-risk interventions and "increasing the value of futures where we survive" ones.

I'm not even sure what the later look like to be honest - but I am inclined to think significant value lies in marginal actions now which affect it, even if I'm not sure what they are.

X-risks seem much more "either this is a world in which we go extinct" or a "world with no real extinction risk". It's one or the other, but many interventions hinge on the situation being much more precarious.

I find the "mistopia" notion quite compelling - ignoring wild animal welfare and non-totalist population ethics, eg. common sense; seems dangerously likely to dominate in disempowerment scenarios.

But I have no idea how to change that. More Global Priorities Research? Public awareness campaigning? Vegan advocacy?  

Shifting rightward until I have better ideas.

I think it's widely accepted on the forum that current society is net QUALY/util negative. It's also not entirely clear that this value will become net positive, and I think many of the methods for making society net-positive would also reduce existential risk (encouraging greater compassion, which also reduces the risk of wars/other dangerous competitive dynamics).

I think avoiding existential risk is the most important thing. As long as we can do that and don't have some kind of lock in, then we'll have time to think about and optimize the value of the future.