throwaway666d

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

I agree about the American military, although they are not necessarily an ultimate force for good as they are an instrument largely of Congress and the President (which aren't particularly likely to make ethical calls these days, unfortunately). But by God they are a pretty decent instrument.

throwaway666d

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

The value of a human life stems from two components:

1) the value of their consciousness (how overall good or bad it feels to be them) 2) their expected instrumental effects on the nature of all expected future people's consciousness.

Because of the vast numbers of future people which could exist, and the uncertainty of this due to the landscape of existential threats humanity faces, the magnitude of the value of most people's expected instrumental effects vastly outsizes the value of their qualia.

This either makes the typical person's life overwhelmingly valuable, or overwhelmingly deleterious. It's either one, but it's not easy to confidently say which, as it's not perfectly clear whether your average person net adds or substracts to humanity's net risk of extinction. Unfortunately, most people display rather abysmal epistemology and are adding more to technological progress then they are philosophical/epistemic/coordination progress.

This makes it plausible to me that their lives are net-harmful.

throwaway666d

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

The risks posed by emerging technology is rapidly outpacing our ability to manage them, both technologically and philosophically. Reservedly, I'm convinced that the best thing that could happen to humanity would be some event that drastically slows technological progress, such as an event which reduces the population to somewhere between 10,000 and 1,000,000 individuals but without nearly causing extinction. Ideally, those remaining people would be especially intelligent and pro-social. This would give us far more time to get our act together by building a robust epistemology-driven civilization where our ability to handle advanced tech outpaces the emergence of such tech.

comments