If your view is that you only have reasons to include those, whom you have instrumental reasons to include, on your view: the members of an AGI lab that developed ASI ought to include only themselves if they believe (in expectation) that they can successfully do so. This view is implausible, it is implausible that this is what they would have most moral reasons to do.
I note that not everyone considers that implausible, for example Tamsin Leake’s QACI takes this view.
I disagree with both Tamsin Leake and with you: I think that humans-only, but only humans, makes the most sense. But for concrete reasons, not for free-floating moral reasons.
I was writing the following as a response to NicholasKees’ comment, but I think it belongs better as a response here:
...imagine you are in a mob in such a “tyranny of the mob” kind of situation, with mob-CEV. For the time being, imagine a small mob.
You tell the other mob members: “we should expand the franchise/function to other people not in our mob”.
OK, should the other mob members agree?
maybe they agree with you that it is right that the function should be expanded to other humans. In which case mob-CEV would do it automatically.
Or they don’t agree. And still don’t agree after full consideration/extrapolation.
If they don’t agree, what do you do? Ask Total-Utility-God to strike them down for disobeying the One True Morality?
At this point you are stuck, if the mob-CEV AI has made the mob untouchable to entities outside it.
But there is something you could have done earlier. Earlier, you could have allied with other humans outside of the mob, to pressure the would-be-mob members to pre-commit to not excluding other humans.
And in doing so, you might have insisted on including all humans, not specifically the humans you were explicitly allying with, even if you didn’t directly care about everyone, because:
the ally group might shift over time, or people outside the ally group might make their own demands
if the franchise is not set to a solid Schelling point (like all humans) then people currently inside might still worry about the lines being shifted to exclude them.
Thus, you include the Sentinelese, not because you’re worried about them coming over to demand to be included, but because if you draw the line to exclude them then it becomes more ambiguous where the line should be drawn, and relatively low (but non-zero) influence members of the coalition might be worried about also being excluded. And, as fellow humans, it is probably relatively low cost to include them—they’re unlikely to have wildly divergent values or be utility monsters etc.
You might ask, is it not also a solid Schelling point to include all entities whatsoever?
First, not really, we don’t have good definitions of “all sentient beings”, not nearly as good as “all humans”. It might be different if, e.g., we had time travel, such that we would also have to worry about intermediate evolutionary steps between humans and non-human-animals, but we don’t.
In the future, we will have more ambiguous cases, but CEV can handle it. If someone wants to modify themselves into a utility monster, maybe we would want to let them do so, but discount their weighting in CEV to a more normal level when they do it.
And second, it is not costless to expand the franchise. If you allow non-humans preemptively you are opening yourself up to, as an example, the xenophobic aliens scenario, but also potentially who-knows-what other dangerous situations since entities could have arbitrary values.
And that’s why expanding the franchise to all humans makes sense, even if individuals don’t care about other humans that much, but expanding to all sentients does not, even if people do care about other sentients.
In response to the rest of your comment:
If you want to argue that s-risks would be prevented for certain, please address the object-level arguments I present.
If humans would want to prevent s-risks, then they would be prevented. If humans would not want to prevent s-risks, they would not be prevented.
If you want to argue that the occurrence of s-risks would not be bad, you want to argue for a particular view in normative and practical ethics.
You’re the one arguing that people should override their actual values, and instead of programming an AI to follow their actual values, do something else! Without even an instrumental reason to do so (other than alleged moral considerations that aren’t in their actual values, but coming from some other magical direction)!
Asking someone to do something that isn’t in their values, without giving them instrumental reasons to do so, makes no sense.
It is you who needs a strong meta-ethical case for that. It shouldn’t be the objector who has to justify not overriding their values!
I note that not everyone considers that implausible, for example Tamsin Leake’s QACI takes this view.
I disagree with both Tamsin Leake and with you: I think that humans-only, but only humans, makes the most sense. But for concrete reasons, not for free-floating moral reasons.
I was writing the following as a response to NicholasKees’ comment, but I think it belongs better as a response here:
...imagine you are in a mob in such a “tyranny of the mob” kind of situation, with mob-CEV. For the time being, imagine a small mob.
You tell the other mob members: “we should expand the franchise/function to other people not in our mob”.
OK, should the other mob members agree?
maybe they agree with you that it is right that the function should be expanded to other humans. In which case mob-CEV would do it automatically.
Or they don’t agree. And still don’t agree after full consideration/extrapolation.
If they don’t agree, what do you do? Ask Total-Utility-God to strike them down for disobeying the One True Morality?
At this point you are stuck, if the mob-CEV AI has made the mob untouchable to entities outside it.
But there is something you could have done earlier. Earlier, you could have allied with other humans outside of the mob, to pressure the would-be-mob members to pre-commit to not excluding other humans.
And in doing so, you might have insisted on including all humans, not specifically the humans you were explicitly allying with, even if you didn’t directly care about everyone, because:
the ally group might shift over time, or people outside the ally group might make their own demands
if the franchise is not set to a solid Schelling point (like all humans) then people currently inside might still worry about the lines being shifted to exclude them.
Thus, you include the Sentinelese, not because you’re worried about them coming over to demand to be included, but because if you draw the line to exclude them then it becomes more ambiguous where the line should be drawn, and relatively low (but non-zero) influence members of the coalition might be worried about also being excluded. And, as fellow humans, it is probably relatively low cost to include them—they’re unlikely to have wildly divergent values or be utility monsters etc.
You might ask, is it not also a solid Schelling point to include all entities whatsoever?
First, not really, we don’t have good definitions of “all sentient beings”, not nearly as good as “all humans”. It might be different if, e.g., we had time travel, such that we would also have to worry about intermediate evolutionary steps between humans and non-human-animals, but we don’t.
In the future, we will have more ambiguous cases, but CEV can handle it. If someone wants to modify themselves into a utility monster, maybe we would want to let them do so, but discount their weighting in CEV to a more normal level when they do it.
And second, it is not costless to expand the franchise. If you allow non-humans preemptively you are opening yourself up to, as an example, the xenophobic aliens scenario, but also potentially who-knows-what other dangerous situations since entities could have arbitrary values.
And that’s why expanding the franchise to all humans makes sense, even if individuals don’t care about other humans that much, but expanding to all sentients does not, even if people do care about other sentients.
In response to the rest of your comment:
If humans would want to prevent s-risks, then they would be prevented. If humans would not want to prevent s-risks, they would not be prevented.
You’re the one arguing that people should override their actual values, and instead of programming an AI to follow their actual values, do something else! Without even an instrumental reason to do so (other than alleged moral considerations that aren’t in their actual values, but coming from some other magical direction)!
Asking someone to do something that isn’t in their values, without giving them instrumental reasons to do so, makes no sense.
It is you who needs a strong meta-ethical case for that. It shouldn’t be the objector who has to justify not overriding their values!