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komponisto comments on Nick Bostrom's TED talk and setting priorities - Less Wrong Discussion
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See Levels of Action. Creating utopia is analogous to an object-level action, while avoiding extinction would be a meta-level action: avoiding extinction supports the creation of utopia (in fact it is, obviously, necessary). However, at some point, meta-level actions have to bottom out in an object-level action -- otherwise they were pointless.
See also Lost Purposes. If we devote too much of ourselves to avoiding extinction, our values may drift away and we may simply become survival-maximizing agents who never end up creating utopia.
Some kinds of utopia may also be meta-level actions. Imagine a world without wars and starvation, where all people can spend time doing their hobbies... and some of them choose to work on existential risks. Give everyone on this planet a decent education, and you can have hundred times more people on LW.