Existential risk and growth
Leopold Aschenbrenner (Columbia University)
GPI Working Paper No. 6-2020
An updated version of the paper was published as GPI Working Paper No. 13-2024, and is available here.
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
Numbers Tell, Words Sell – Michael Thaler (University College London), Mattie Toma (University of Warwick) and Victor Yaneng Wang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
When communicating numeric estimates with policymakers, journalists, or the general public, experts must choose between using numbers or natural language. We run two experiments to study whether experts strategically use language to communicate numeric estimates in order to persuade receivers. In Study 1, senders communicate probabilities of abstract events to receivers on Prolific, and in Study 2 academic researchers communicate the effect sizes in research papers to government policymakers. When…
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…
Simulation expectation – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
I present a new argument for the claim that I’m much more likely to be a person living in a computer simulation than a person living in the ground-level of reality. I consider whether this argument can be blocked by an externalist view of what my evidence supports, and I urge caution against the easy assumption that actually finding lots of simulations would increase the odds that I myself am in one.