Beliefs about the end of humanity: How bad, likely, and important is human extinction?
Matthew Coleman (Northeastern University), Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford), Joshua Lewis (New York University) and Geoffrey Goodwin (University of Pennsylvania)
GPI Working Paper No. 1-2024
Human extinction would mean the end of humanity’s achievements, culture, and future potential. According to some ethical views, this would be a terrible outcome. But how do people think about human extinction? And how much do they prioritize preventing extinction over other societal issues? Across five empirical studies (N = 2,147; U.S. and China) we find that people consider extinction prevention a societal priority and deserving of greatly increased societal resources. However, despite estimating the likelihood of human extinction to be 5% this century (U.S. median), people believe that the chances would need to be around 30% for it to be the very highest priority. In line with this, people consider extinction prevention to be only one among several important societal issues. People’s judgments about the relative importance of extinction prevention appear relatively fixed and hard to change by reason-based interventions.
Other working papers
Economic growth under transformative AI – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University) and Anton Korinek (University of Virginia)
Industrialized countries have long seen relatively stable growth in output per capita and a stable labor share. AI may be transformative, in the sense that it may break one or both of these stylized facts. This review outlines the ways this may happen by placing several strands of the literature on AI and growth within a common framework. We first evaluate models in which AI increases output production, for example via increases in capital’s substitutability for labor…
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…
Welfare and felt duration – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
How should we understand the duration of a pleasant or unpleasant sensation, insofar as its duration modulates how good or bad the experience is overall? Given that we seem able to distinguish between subjective and objective duration and that how well or badly someone’s life goes is naturally thought of as something to be assessed from her own perspective, it seems intuitive that it is subjective duration that modulates how good or bad an experience is from the perspective of an individual’s welfare. …