What if an AI creates millions, billions, trillions of alternative hypotheses, models that are actually people, who die when they are disproven?
Then millions, billions, or trillions of people die. That's a lot in comparison to what a human normally deals with. That upper bound is more than the total number of people who have ever lived, but it's still nothing in comparison to the astronomical waste of waiting even a second to consider the problem. Not unless you really, really hate death.
How long does someone have to live before their life is worth living? Before all the joy they feel balances out the sadness of their death? I haven't bothered running the numbers, but I'm sure that if it's less than a billion years, the sacrifice is more than worth it.
Today's post, Nonperson Predicates was originally published on 27 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Devil's Offers, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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