OK, this is my first day posting on Less Wrong. This topic "Don't Plan For the Future" interests me a lot and I have a few ideas on it. Yet it's been inactive for over a year. Possibilities that occur to me: (1) the subject has been taken up more definitively in a more recent thread, and I need to find it, (2) because of the time lag, I should start a new "Discussion" (I think I have more than 2 karma points already so it's at least possible) even if it's the same basic idea as this, (3) I should post ideas and considerations right here despite the time lag. If there's some guide that would answer this question, I'll happily take a pointer to that as well.
Welcome Bart. Thread necromancy is encouraged here. Go ahead and share your ideas!
Why do we imagine our actions could have consequences for more than a few million years into the future?
Unless what we believe about evolution is wrong, or UFAI is unlikely, or we are very very lucky, we should assume there are already a large number of unfriendly AIs in the universe, and probably in our galaxy; and that they will assimilate us within a few million years.
Therefore, justifications for harming people on Earth today in the name of protecting the entire universe over all time from UFAI in the future, like this one, should not be done. Our default assumption should be that the offspring of Earth will at best have a short happy life.
ADDED: If you observe, as many have, that Earth has not yet been assimilated, you can draw one of these conclusions:
Surely, for a Bayesian, the more reasonable conclusion is number 2! Conclusion 1 has priors we can estimate numerically. Conclusion 2 has priors we know very little about.
To say, "I am so confident in my beliefs about what a superintelligent AI will do, that I consider it more likely that I live on an astronomically lucky planet, than that those beliefs are wrong", is something I might come up with if asked to draw a caricature of irrationality.