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Multiheaded comments on Just another day in utopia - Less Wrong
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Are you sure you want them to pop into existence? Why? I just can't understand! Why must there be more people? So that you can have more smiley faces? That's the road to paper-clipping!
Well, yes. Several popular versions of utilitarianism lead by a fairly short path to what's probably the first paperclipping scenario I ever read about, although it's not usually described in those terms.
Coming up with a version of utilitarianism that doesn't have those problems or an equally unintuitive complement to them is harder than it looks, though.
Why does anyone value anything? If we could painlessly pop all but 70 human beings out of existence but make the ones who remain much happier (say, 10x as happy), would you do it? Why not? Why must there be more people?
That's easy; we have to look at both cases in some detail.
-Forking over a part of our genes, mind, society and culture to create new beings with new complexity, knowing that less than optimal conditions await them, -
-versus refraining from erasing all of the extant and potential value and complexity of current beings, here and now, for a very mixed blessing (increasing the smileyness of faces while decreasing the amount of tiles). The second action has much greater utility, and is not very much like the first at all. So we could easily do the second while avoiding the first, and be consistent in our values and judgment.
Sorry, I'm a bit high.