There might be a good future, or a bad future, or no future; but who ever talks of a good future riddled with bad, or a bad future with islands of good?
Given an FAI singleton or uFAI singleton, islands are improbable. A Malthusian future full of ems, however, seems like a possible fit to your model. So expectations about how intelligence and power will coalesce or diversify are crucial.
But otherwise, this idea that this is the Now that matters the most, reflects a sort of optimism of the will
I think it just reflects a straight-line prediction. Every previous "Now" (as said in the past) was crucial; why wouldn't this one be? I'm assuming that history is pretty chaotic. Small disturbances in the past would lead to vast ones in the present.
Nick Beckstead: On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future
ABSTRACT: In slogan form, the thesis of this dissertation is that shaping the far future is overwhelmingly important. More precisely, I argue that:
Main Thesis: From a global perspective, what matters most (in expectation) is that we do what is best (in expectation) for the general trajectory along which our descendants develop over the coming millions of years or longer.
The first chapter introduces some key concepts, clarifies the main thesis, and outlines what follows in later chapters. Some of the key concepts include: existential risk, the world's development trajectory, proximate benefits and ripple effects, speeding up development, trajectory changes, and the distinction between broad and targeted attempts to shape the far future. The second chapter is a defense of some methodological assumptions for developing normative theories which makes my thesis more plausible. In the third chapter, I introduce and begin to defend some key empirical and normative assumptions which, if true, strongly support my main thesis. In the fourth and fifth chapters, I argue against two of the strongest objections to my arguments. These objections come from population ethics, and are based on Person-Affecting Views and views according to which additional lives have diminishing marginal value. I argue that these views face extreme difficulties and cannot plausibly be used to rebut my arguments. In the sixth and seventh chapters, I discuss a decision-theoretic paradox which is relevant to my arguments. The simplest plausible theoretical assumptions which support my main thesis imply a view I call fanaticism, according to which any non-zero probability of an infinitely good outcome, no matter how small, is better than any probability of a finitely good outcome. I argue that denying fanaticism is inconsistent with other normative principles that seem very obvious, so that we are faced with a paradox. I have no solution to the paradox; I instead argue that we should continue to use our inconsistent principles, but we should use them tastefully. We should do this because, currently, we know of no consistent set of principles which does better.
[If there's already been a discussion post about this, my apologies, I couldn't find it.]