Existential risk and growth

Leopold Aschenbrenner (Columbia University)

GPI Working Paper No. 6-2020

Human activity can create or mitigate risks of catastrophes, such as nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, or artificial intelligence run amok. These could even imperil the survival of human civilization. What is the relationship between economic growth and such existential risks? In a model of directed technical change, with moderate parameters, existential risk follows a Kuznets-style inverted U-shape. This suggests we could be living in a unique “time of perils,” having developed technologies advanced enough to threaten our permanent destruction, but not having grown wealthy enough yet to be willing to spend sufficiently on safety. Accelerating growth during this “time of perils” initially increases risk, but improves the chances of humanity’s survival in the long run. Conversely, even short-term stagnation could substantially curtail the future of humanity.

Other working papers

The freedom of future people – Andreas T Schmidt (University of Groningen)

What happens to liberal political philosophy, if we consider not only the freedom of present but also future people? In this article, I explore the case for long-term liberalism: freedom should be a central goal, and we should often be particularly concerned with effects on long-term future distributions of freedom. I provide three arguments. First, liberals should be long-term liberals: liberal arguments to value freedom give us reason to be (particularly) concerned with future freedom…

Concepts of existential catastrophe – Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford)

The notion of existential catastrophe is increasingly appealed to in discussion of risk management around emerging technologies, but it is not completely clear what this notion amounts to. Here, I provide an opinionated survey of the space of plausibly useful definitions of existential catastrophe. Inter alia, I discuss: whether to define existential catastrophe in ex post or ex ante terms, whether an ex ante definition should be in terms of loss of expected value or loss of potential…

The unexpected value of the future – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

Consider longtermism: the view that the morally best options available to us, in many important practical decisions, are those that provide the greatest improvements in the (ex ante) value of the far future. Many who accept longtermism do so because they accept an impartial, aggregative theory of moral betterness in conjunction with expected value theory. But such a combination of views implies absurdity if the (impartial, aggregated) value of humanity’s future is undefined…