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
Misjudgment Exacerbates Collective Action Problems – Joshua Lewis (New York University) et al.
In collective action problems, suboptimal collective outcomes arise from each individual optimizing their own wellbeing. Past work assumes individuals do this because they care more about themselves than others. Yet, other factors could also contribute. We examine the role of empirical beliefs. Our results suggest people underestimate individual impact on collective problems. When collective action seems worthwhile, individual action often does not, even if the expected ratio of costs to benefits is the same. …
Time discounting, consistency and special obligations: a defence of Robust Temporalism – Harry R. Lloyd (Yale University)
This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept…
Simulation expectation – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
I present a new argument for the claim that I’m much more likely to be a person living in a computer simulation than a person living in the ground-level of reality. I consider whether this argument can be blocked by an externalist view of what my evidence supports, and I urge caution against the easy assumption that actually finding lots of simulations would increase the odds that I myself am in one.