In nature, the best way you can help your great grand-kids is to help your children. If there was a way to help your grandchildren at the expense of your children that ultimately benefitted the grandchildren, nature might favour it—but usually there is simply no easy way to do that.
Grandparents do sometimes favour more distant offspring in their wills—if they think the direct offspring are compromised or irresponsible, for example. Such behaviour is right and natural.
Temporal discounting is a reflection of your ignorance and impotence when it comes to the distant future. It is not really that you fundamentally care less about the far future—it is more that you don’t know and can’t help—so investing mental resources would be rather pointless.
Robin argues that few are prepared to invest now to prevent future destruction of the planet. The conclusion there seems to be that humans are not utilitarian agents.
Robin seems to claim that humans do not invest in order to pass things on to future generations—whereas in fact they do just that whenever they invest in their own offspring.
Obviously you don’t invest in your great-grandchildren directly. You invest in your offspring—they can manage your funds better than you can do so from your wheelchair or grave.
Temporal discounting make sense. Organisms do it becasue they can’t see or control the far future as well as their direct descendants can. In those rare cases where that is not true, direct descendants can sometimes be bypassed.
However, you wouldn’t want to build temporal discounting into the utility function of a machine intelligence. It knows better than you do its prediction capablities—and can figure out such things for itself.
Since that exact point was made in the Eliezer essay Robin’s post was a reply to, it isn’t clear that Robin understands that.
In nature, the best way you can help your great grand-kids is to help your children. If there was a way to help your grandchildren at the expense of your children that ultimately benefitted the grandchildren, nature might favour it—but usually there is simply no easy way to do that.
Grandparents do sometimes favour more distant offspring in their wills—if they think the direct offspring are compromised or irresponsible, for example. Such behaviour is right and natural.
Temporal discounting is a reflection of your ignorance and impotence when it comes to the distant future. It is not really that you fundamentally care less about the far future—it is more that you don’t know and can’t help—so investing mental resources would be rather pointless.
According to Robin Hanson, our behavior proves that we don’t care about the far future.
Robin argues that few are prepared to invest now to prevent future destruction of the planet. The conclusion there seems to be that humans are not utilitarian agents.
Robin seems to claim that humans do not invest in order to pass things on to future generations—whereas in fact they do just that whenever they invest in their own offspring.
Obviously you don’t invest in your great-grandchildren directly. You invest in your offspring—they can manage your funds better than you can do so from your wheelchair or grave.
Temporal discounting make sense. Organisms do it becasue they can’t see or control the far future as well as their direct descendants can. In those rare cases where that is not true, direct descendants can sometimes be bypassed.
However, you wouldn’t want to build temporal discounting into the utility function of a machine intelligence. It knows better than you do its prediction capablities—and can figure out such things for itself.
Since that exact point was made in the Eliezer essay Robin’s post was a reply to, it isn’t clear that Robin understands that.