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
Doomsday and objective chance – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Lewis’s Principal Principle says that one should usually align one’s credences with the known chances. In this paper I develop a version of the Principal Principle that deals well with some exceptional cases related to the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic modality. I explain how this principle gives a unified account of the Sleeping Beauty problem and chance-based principles of anthropic reasoning…
How much should governments pay to prevent catastrophes? Longtermism’s limited role – Carl Shulman (Advisor, Open Philanthropy) and Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. …
Dynamic public good provision under time preference heterogeneity – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
I explore the implications of time preference heterogeneity for the private fund- ing of public goods. The assumption that funders use a common discount rate is knife-edge: relaxing it yields substantially different equilibria, for two reasons. First, time preference heterogeneity motivates intertemporal polarization, analogous to the polarization seen in a static public good game. In the simplest settings, more patient funders spend nothing early in time and less patient funders spending nothing later. Second…