Should longtermists recommend hastening extinction rather than delaying it?
Richard Pettigrew (University of Bristol)
GPI Working Paper No. 2-2022, forthcoming at The Monist
Longtermism is the view that the most urgent global priorities, and those to which we should devote the largest portion of our current resources, are those that focus on ensuring a long future for humanity, and perhaps sentient or intelligent life more generally, and improving the quality of those lives in that long future. The central argument for this conclusion is that, given a fixed amount of a resource that we are able to devote to global priorities, the longtermist’s favoured interventions have greater expected goodness than each of the other available interventions, including those that focus on the health and well-being of the current population. In this paper, I argue that, even granting the longtermist’s axiology and their consequentialist ethics, we are not morally required to choose whatever option maximises expected utility, and may not be permitted to do so. Instead, if their axiology and consequentialism is correct, we should choose using a decision theory that is sensitive to risk, and allows us to give greater weight to worse-case outcomes than expected utility theory. And such decision theories do not recommend longtermist interventions. Indeed, sometimes, they recommend hastening human extinction. Many, though not all, will take this as a reductio of the longtermist’s axiology or consequentialist ethics. I remain agnostic on the conclusion we should draw.
Other working papers
Measuring AI-Driven Risk with Stock Prices – Susana Campos-Martins (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
We propose an empirical approach to identify and measure AI-driven shocks based on the co-movements of relevant financial asset prices. For that purpose, we first calculate the common volatility of the share prices of major US AI-relevant companies. Then we isolate the events that shake this industry only from those that shake all sectors of economic activity at the same time. For the sample analysed, AI shocks are identified when there are announcements about (mergers and) acquisitions in the AI industry, launching of…
It Only Takes One: The Psychology of Unilateral Decisions – Joshua Lewis (New York University) et al.
Sometimes, one decision can guarantee that a risky event will happen. For instance, it only took one team of researchers to synthesize and publish the horsepox genome, thus imposing its publication even though other researchers might have refrained for biosecurity reasons. We examine cases where everybody who can impose a given event has the same goal but different information about whether the event furthers that goal. …
Quadratic Funding with Incomplete Information – Luis M. V. Freitas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Wilfredo L. Maldonado (University of Sao Paulo)
Quadratic funding is a public good provision mechanism that satisfies desirable theoretical properties, such as efficiency under complete information, and has been gaining popularity in practical applications. We evaluate this mechanism in a setting of incomplete information regarding individual preferences, and show that this result only holds under knife-edge conditions. We also estimate the inefficiency of the mechanism in a variety of settings and show, in particular, that inefficiency increases…