The evidentialist’s wager
William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University), Aron Vallinder (Forethought Foundation), Caspar Österheld (Duke University), Carl Shulman (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University), Johannes Treutlein (TU Berlin)
GPI Working Paper No. 12-2019
Suppose that an altruistic and morally motivated agent who is uncertain between evidential decision theory (EDT) and causal decision theory (CDT) finds herself in a situation in which the two theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act in accordance with EDT. First, we claim that that the appropriate response to normative uncertainty is to hedge one’s bets. That is, if the stakes are much higher on one theory than another, and the credences you assign to each of these theories aren’t very different, then it’s appropriate to choose the option which performs best on the high-stakes theory. Second, we show that, given the assumption of altruism, the existence of correlated decision-makers will increase the stakes for EDT but leave the stakes for CDT unaffected. Together these two claims imply that whenever there are sufficiently many correlated agents, the appropriate response is to act in accordance with EDT.
Other working papers
Intergenerational experimentation and catastrophic risk – Fikri Pitsuwan (Center of Economic Research, ETH Zurich)
I study an intergenerational game in which each generation experiments on a risky technology that provides private benefits, but may also cause a temporary catastrophe. I find a folk-theorem-type result on which there is a continuum of equilibria. Compared to the socially optimal level, some equilibria exhibit too much, while others too little, experimentation. The reason is that the payoff externality causes preemptive experimentation, while the informational externality leads to more caution…
Against Willing Servitude: Autonomy in the Ethics of Advanced Artificial Intelligence – Adam Bales (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Some people believe that advanced artificial intelligence systems (AIs) might, in the future, come to have moral status. Further, humans might be tempted to design such AIs that they serve us, carrying out tasks that make our lives better. This raises the question of whether designing AIs with moral status to be willing servants would problematically violate their autonomy. In this paper, I argue that it would in fact do so.
The epistemic challenge to longtermism – Christian Tarsney (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict— perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism…