Existential Risk and Growth
Leopold Aschenbrenner and Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 13-2024
Technology increases consumption but can create or mitigate existential risk to human civilization. Though accelerating technological development may increase the hazard rate (the risk of existential catastrophe per period) in the short run, two considerations suggest that acceleration typically decreases the risk that such a catastrophe ever occurs. First, acceleration decreases the time spent at each technology level. Second, given a policy option to sacrifice consumption for safety, acceleration motivates greater sacrifices by decreasing the marginal utility of consumption and increasing the value of the future. Under broad conditions, optimal policy thus produces an “existential risk Kuznets curve”, in which the hazard rate rises and then falls with the technology level and acceleration pulls forward a future in which risk is low. The negative impacts of acceleration on risk are offset only given policy failures, or direct contributions of acceleration to cumulative risk, that are sufficiently extreme.
An earlier version of the paper was published as GPI Working Paper No. 6-2020, and is available here.
Other working papers
How should risk and ambiguity affect our charitable giving? – Lara Buchak (Princeton University)
Suppose we want to do the most good we can with a particular sum of money, but we cannot be certain of the consequences of different ways of making use of it. This paper explores how our attitudes towards risk and ambiguity bear on what we should do. It shows that risk-avoidance and ambiguity-aversion can each provide good reason to divide our money between various charitable organizations rather than to give it all to the most promising one…
The epistemic challenge to longtermism – Christian Tarsney (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict— perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism…
Funding public projects: A case for the Nash product rule – Florian Brandl (Stanford University), Felix Brandt (Technische Universität München), Dominik Peters (University of Oxford), Christian Stricker (Technische Universität München) and Warut Suksompong (National University of Singapore)
We study a mechanism design problem where a community of agents wishes to fund public projects via voluntary monetary contributions by the community members. This serves as a model for public expenditure without an exogenously available budget, such as participatory budgeting or voluntary tax programs, as well as donor coordination when interpreting charities as public projects and donations as contributions. Our aim is to identify a mutually beneficial distribution of the individual contributions. …