Concepts of existential catastrophe
Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 8-2023, forthcoming in The Monist
The notion of existential catastrophe is increasingly appealed to in discussion of risk management around emerging technologies, but it is not completely clear what this notion amounts to. Here, I provide an opinionated survey of the space of plausibly useful definitions of existential catastrophe. Inter alia, I discuss: whether to define existential catastrophe in ex post or ex ante terms, whether an ex ante definition should be in terms of loss of expected value or loss of potential, and what kind of probabilities should be involved in any appeal to expected value.
Other working papers
Aggregating Small Risks of Serious Harms – Tomi Francis (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
According to Partial Aggregation, a serious harm can be outweighed by a large number of somewhat less serious harms, but can outweigh any number of trivial harms. In this paper, I address the question of how we should extend Partial Aggregation to cases of risk, and especially to cases involving small risks of serious harms. I argue that, contrary to the most popular versions of the ex ante and ex post views, we should sometimes prevent a small risk that a large number of people will suffer serious harms rather than prevent…
The evidentialist’s wager – William MacAskill, Aron Vallinder (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University) Caspar Österheld (Duke University), Carl Shulman (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University), Johannes Treutlein (TU Berlin)
Suppose that an altruistic and morally motivated agent who is uncertain between evidential decision theory (EDT) and causal decision theory (CDT) finds herself in a situation in which the two theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act …
Critical-set views, biographical identity, and the long term – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Critical-set views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by subtracting some constant from the welfare score of each life in a population. These views are thus sensitive to facts about biographical identity: identity between lives. In this paper, I argue that questions of biographical identity give us reason to reject critical-set views and embrace the total view. I end with a practical implication. If we shift our credences towards the total view, we should also shift our efforts towards ensuring that humanity survives for the long term.