TL;DR

Human extinction is trending: there has been a lot of noise, mainly on X, about the apparent complacency amongst e/acc with respect to human extinction. Extinction also feels adjacent to another view (not particular to e/acc) that ‘the next step in human evolution is {AI/AGI/ASI}’. Many have pushed back robustly against the former, while the latter doesn’t seem very fleshed out. I thought it useful to, briefly, gather the various positions and summarise them, hopefully not too inaccurately, and perhaps pull out some points of convergence.

This is a starting point for my own research (on de-facto extinction via evolution). There is nothing particularly new in here: see the substantial literature in the usual fora for instance. Thomas Moynihan's X-risk (2020) documents the history of humanity's collective realisation of civilisational fragility, while Émile P. Torres’ works (discussed below) set out a possible framework for an ethics [...]

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Outline:

(00:03) TL;DR

(01:58) Varieties of extinction

(02:01) The Yudkowsky position

(02:59) The Bostrom variant

(04:25) (Perhaps) the e/acc view

(08:28) Christiano: ‘humans lose control over the future’

(09:35) Dan Hendrycks: evolutionary pressures disfavour humans

(11:27) Human evolution to some other substrate

(12:28) Anti-natalists and digital suffering

(13:59) Émile P. Torres on the ethics of human extinction

(15:11) Takeaways

(15:23) Whether, and how, we are succeeded matters

(16:09) Timing seems to matter

(17:27) The manner of extinction matters

(18:07) Is this actually an urgent question?

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First published:
December 9th, 2023

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HaGTQcxqjHPyR9Ju6/unpicking-extinction

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Unpicking Extinction” by ukc10014

LessWrong (30+ Karma)