Joe Carlsmith: belief

Transcript context

…Sorry, let me clarify. If this was just a question of, "Do we do AGI and explore the solar system?" and there was nothing beyond the solar system, we FOOM and weird things might happen with the solar system if we get it wrong. Compared to that, billions of galaxies present different stakes. I wonder how much of the discourse hinges on this because of space. I think for most people, very little. People are really focused on what's going to happen to this world around us that we live in. What's going to happen to me and my kids? Some people spend a lot of time on the space stuff, but I think for the immediately pressing stuff about AI, it doesn’t require that at all. Even if you bracket space, time is also very big. We've got 500 million years, a billion years, left on Earth if we don't mess with the sun. Maybe you could get more out of it. That's still a lot. I don't know if it fundamentally changes the narrative. Obviously, the stakes are way smaller if you shrink down to the solar system, insofar as you care about what happens in the future or in space. That does change some stuff potentially. A really nice feature of our current situation—depending on the actual nature of the resource pie—is that there's such an abundance of energy and other resources in principle available to a responsible civilization. Tons of stakeholders, especially ones who are able to get really close to amazing outcomes according to their values with comparatively small allocations of resources, can be satisfied. I feel like everyone with satiable values could be really happy with some small fraction of the available pie. We should just satiate all sorts of stuff. Obviously, we need to figure out gains from trade and balance. There's a bunch of complexity here but in principle, we're in a position to create a really wonderful scenario for tons of different value systems. Correspondingly, we should be really interested in doing that. I sometimes use this heuristic in thinking about the future: We should be aspiring to really leave no one behind. Who are all the stakeholders here? How do we have a fully inclusive vision of how the future could be good from a very wide variety of perspectives? The vastness of space resources makes that a lot easier and very feasible. If you instead imagine it's a much smaller pie, maybe you face tougher trade-offs. That's an important consideration. Is the inclusivity because part of your values includes different potential futures getting to play out? Or is it because of uncertainty about which one is right, so you want to make sure we're not nulling all value if we’re wrong?…

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