- Safety from Xrisk is a common good: We all benefit by making it less likely that we will all die.
- In general, people are somewhat selfish, and value their own personal safety over that of another (uniform) randomly chosen person.
- Thus individuals are not automatically properly incentivized to safeguard the common good of safety from Xrisk.
I hope you all knew that already ;)
I think there's an important distinction between x-risks and most other things we consider to be tragedies of commons: the reward for "cooperating" against "defectors" in an x-risk scenario (putting in disproportionate effort/resources to solve the problem) is still massively positive, conditional on the effort succeeding (and in many calculations, prior to that conditional). In most central examples of tragedies of the commons, the payoff for being a "good actor" surrounded by bad actors is net-negative, even assuming the stewardship is successful.
The common thread is that there might be a free-rider problem in both cases, of course.
This is making the somewhat dubious assumption that X risks are not so neglected that even a "selfish" individual would work to reduce them. Of course, in the not too unreasonable scenario where the cosmic commons is divided up evenly, and you use your portion to make a vast number of duplicates of yourself, the utility, if your utility is linear in copies of yourself, would be vast. Or you might hope to live for a ridiculously long time in a post singularity world.
The effect that a single person can have on X risks is small, but if they were s... (read more)