The case for strong longtermism

Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

GPI Working Paper No. 5-2021

PDF download

A striking fact about the history of civilisation is just how early we are in it. There are 5000 years of recorded history behind us, but how many years are still to come? If we merely last as long as the typical mammalian species, we still have over 200,000 years to go (Barnosky et al. 2011); there could be a further one billion years until the Earth is no longer habitable for humans (Wolf and Toon 2015); and trillions of years until the last conventional star formations (Adams and Laughlin 1999:34). Even on the most conservative of these timelines, we have progressed through a tiny fraction of history. If humanity’s saga were a novel, we would be on the very first page.

Other working papers

The Shutdown Problem: An AI Engineering Puzzle for Decision Theorists – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

I explain and motivate the shutdown problem: the problem of designing artificial agents that (1) shut down when a shutdown button is pressed, (2) don’t try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, and (3) otherwise pursue goals competently. I prove three theorems that make the difficulty precise. These theorems suggest that agents satisfying some innocuous-seeming conditions will often try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, even in cases where it’s costly to do so. I end by noting that…

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…

Economic inequality and the long-term future – Andreas T. Schmidt (University of Groningen) and Daan Juijn (CE Delft)

Why, if at all, should we object to economic inequality? Some central arguments – the argument from decreasing marginal utility for example – invoke instrumental reasons and object to inequality because of its effects…