Comment on Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence

Sun, 07 Feb 2016 23:06:08 GMT

How did you arrive at the conclusion that we're not facing big expected costs with these questions? It seems to me that for example the construction of large nuclear arsenals and lack of sufficient safeguards against nuclear war has already caused a large expected cost, and may have been based on one or more incorrect philosophical understandings (e.g., to the question of, what is the right amount of concern for distant strangers and future people). Similarly with "how much should we prioritize fast technological development?" But this is just from intuition since I don't really know how to compute expected costs when the uncertainties involved have a large moral or normative component.

My best guess is that we will get to do many-centuries-of-current-humanity worth of thinking before we really need to get any of these questions right.

Do you expect technological development to have plateaued by then (i.e., AIs will have invented essentially all technologies feasible in this universe)? If so, do you think there won't be any technologies among them that would let some group of people/AIs unilaterally alter the future of the universe according to their understanding of what is normative? (For example, intentionally or accidentally destroy civilization, or win a decisive war against the rest of the world.) Or do you think something like a world government will have been created to control the use of such technologies?

Discuss