Existential Risk and Growth
Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford) and Leopold Aschenbrenner
GPI Working Paper No. 13-2024
Technologies may pose existential risks to civilization. Though accelerating technological development may increase the risk of anthropogenic existential catastrophe per period in the short run, two considerations suggest that a sector-neutral acceleration decreases the risk that such a catastrophe ever occurs. First, acceleration decreases the time spent at each technology level. Second, since a richer society is willing to sacrifice more for safety, optimal policy can yield an “existential risk Kuznets curve”; acceleration then pulls forward a future in which risk is low. Acceleration typically increases risk only given sufficiently extreme policy failures or direct contributions of acceleration to risk.
An earlier version of the paper was published as GPI Working Paper No. 6-2020, and is available here.
Other working papers
Minimal and Expansive Longtermism – Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford) and Christian Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)
The standard case for longtermism focuses on a small set of risks to the far future, and argues that in a small set of choice situations, the present marginal value of mitigating those risks is very great. But many longtermists are attracted to, and many critics of longtermism worried by, a farther-reaching form of longtermism. According to this farther-reaching form, there are many ways of improving the far future, which determine the value of our options in all or nearly all choice situations…
Egyptology and Fanaticism – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Various decision theories share a troubling implication. They imply that, for any finite amount of value, it would be better to wager it all for a vanishingly small probability of some greater value. Counterintuitive as it might be, this fanaticism has seemingly compelling independent arguments in its favour. In this paper, I consider perhaps the most prima facie compelling such argument: an Egyptology argument (an analogue of the Egyptology argument from population ethics). …
How to neglect the long term – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Consider longtermism: the view that, at least in some of the most important decisions facing agents today, which options are morally best is determined by which are best for the long-term future. Various critics have argued that longtermism is false—indeed, that it is obviously false, and that we can reject it on normative grounds without close consideration of certain descriptive facts. In effect, it is argued, longtermism would be false even if real-world agents had promising means…