Desires and preferences about paperclips can be satisfied. They can sense, learn, grow, reproduce, etc.
Do you take that personally seriously or is it something someone else believes? Human experience with desire satisfaction and “learning” and “growth” isn’t going to transfer over to how it is for paperclip maximizers, and a generalization that this is still something that matters to us is unlikely to succeed. I predict an absence of any there there.
Yes, I believe that the existence of the thing itself, setting aside impacts on other life that it creates or interferes with, is better than nothing, although far short of the best thing that could be done with comparable resources.
Do you take that personally seriously or is it something someone else believes? Human experience with desire satisfaction and “learning” and “growth” isn’t going to transfer over to how it is for paperclip maximizers, and a generalization that this is still something that matters to us is unlikely to succeed. I predict an absence of any there there.
Yes, I believe that the existence of the thing itself, setting aside impacts on other life that it creates or interferes with, is better than nothing, although far short of the best thing that could be done with comparable resources.
This is far from obvious. There are definitely people who claim “morality” is satisfying the preferences of as many agents as you can.
If morality evolved for game-theoretic reasons, there might even be something to this, although I personally think it’s too neat to endorse.