Toby Ord recently published a nice piece On the Value of Advancing Progress about mathematical projections of far-future outcomes given different rates of progress and risk levels. The problem with that and many arguments for caution is that people usually barely care about possibilities even twenty years out.

We could talk about sharp discounting curves in decision-making studies, and how that makes sense given evolutionary pressures in tribal environments. But I think this is pretty obvious from talking to people and watching our political and economic practices.

Utilitarianism is a nicely self-consistent value system. Utilitarianism pretty clearly implies longtermism. Most people don't care that much about logical consistency,[1] so they are happily non-utilitarian and non-longtermist in a variety of ways. Many arguments for AGI safety are longtermist, or at least long-term, so they're not going to work well for most of humanity.

This is another fairly obvious [...]

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
August 12th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdracpKGbH4xqprQK/humanity-isn-t-remotely-longtermist-so-arguments-for-agi-x

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Humanity isn’t remotely longtermist, so arguments for AGI x-risk should focus on the near term” by Seth Herd

LessWrong (30+ Karma)