The Significance, Persistence, Contingency Framework
William MacAskill, Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Aron Vallinder (Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Institute)
GPI Technical Report No. T1-2022
The world, considered from beginning to end, combines many different features, or states of affairs, that contribute to its value. The value of each feature can be factored into its significance—its average value per unit time—and its persistence—how long it lasts. Sometimes, though, we want to ask a further question: how much of the feature’s value can be attributed to a particular agent’s decision at a particular point in time (or to some other originating event)? In other words, to what extent is the feature’s value contingent on the agent’s choice? For this, we must also look at the counterfactual: how would things have turned out otherwise?
Other working papers
Imperfect Recall and AI Delegation – Eric Olav Chen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford), Alexis Ghersengorin (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Sami Petersen (Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
A principal wants to deploy an artificial intelligence (AI) system to perform some task. But the AI may be misaligned and aim to pursue a conflicting objective. The principal cannot restrict its options or deliver punishments. Instead, the principal is endowed with the ability to impose imperfect recall on the agent. The principal can then simulate the task and obscure whether it is real or part of a test. This allows the principal to screen misaligned AIs during testing and discipline their behaviour in deployment. By increasing the…
Longtermist institutional reform – Tyler M. John (Rutgers University) and William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
There is a vast number of people who will live in the centuries and millennia to come. Even if homo sapiens survives merely as long as a typical species, we have hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us. And our future potential could be much greater than that again: it will be hundreds of millions of years until the Earth is sterilized by the expansion of the Sun, and many trillions of years before the last stars die out. …
Existential Risk and Growth – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford) and Leopold Aschenbrenner
Technologies may pose existential risks to civilization. Though accelerating technological development may increase the risk of anthropogenic existential catastrophe per period in the short run, two considerations suggest that a sector-neutral acceleration decreases the risk that such a catastrophe ever occurs. First, acceleration decreases the time spent at each technology level. Second, since a richer society is willing to sacrifice more for safety, optimal policy can yield an “existential risk Kuznets curve”; acceleration…