I’ve seen this kind of opinion before (on Twitter, and maybe reddit?), and I strongly suspect that the average person would react with extreme revulsion to it. It most closely resembles “cartoon villain morality”, in being a direct tradeoff between everyone’s lives and someone’s immortality. People strongly value the possibility of their children and grandchildren being able to have further children of their own, and for things in the world to continue on. And of course, the statement plays so well into stereotypes of politically-oriented age differences: Old people not sufficiently caring about what happens after they die, so they’ll take decisions that let young people deal with catastrophes, young people thinking they’ll never die and being so selfish that they discount the broader world outside themselves, etc. If anything, this is a “please speak directly into the microphone” situation, where the framing would pull people very strongly in the direction of stopping AGI.
I think the current situation is/was greatly distorted by signalling games that people play. Once everyone realises that this is an actual choice, there is a chance they change their opinions to reflect the true tradeoff. (This depends a lot on network effects, shifting Overton window etc., I’m not claiming that 100% of the effect would be rational consideration. But I think rational consideration biases the process to in a non-negligible way.). But yes, one of the pieces of evidence is how old people don’t seem to particularly care about the future of civilisation.
But yes, one of the pieces of evidence is how old people don’t seem to particularly care about the future of civilisation.
I don’t think this is true. Stereotype evidence: your average conservative old person loves their country and is mad that college campuses are liberal because it means elites will ruin it.
The framing of OP is specifically about racing just slowly enough that some specific people make the cut[1], which is absolutely a tradeoff between everyone’s lives and those specific people’s immortality. OP is explicitly indifferent about the effects on other people, including those who die sooner and those whose chances might be ruined by moving too fast for safety.
I’ve seen this kind of opinion before (on Twitter, and maybe reddit?), and I strongly suspect that the average person would react with extreme revulsion to it. It most closely resembles “cartoon villain morality”, in being a direct tradeoff between everyone’s lives and someone’s immortality. People strongly value the possibility of their children and grandchildren being able to have further children of their own, and for things in the world to continue on. And of course, the statement plays so well into stereotypes of politically-oriented age differences: Old people not sufficiently caring about what happens after they die, so they’ll take decisions that let young people deal with catastrophes, young people thinking they’ll never die and being so selfish that they discount the broader world outside themselves, etc. If anything, this is a “please speak directly into the microphone” situation, where the framing would pull people very strongly in the direction of stopping AGI.
I think the current situation is/was greatly distorted by signalling games that people play. Once everyone realises that this is an actual choice, there is a chance they change their opinions to reflect the true tradeoff. (This depends a lot on network effects, shifting Overton window etc., I’m not claiming that 100% of the effect would be rational consideration. But I think rational consideration biases the process to in a non-negligible way.). But yes, one of the pieces of evidence is how old people don’t seem to particularly care about the future of civilisation.
I don’t think this is true. Stereotype evidence: your average conservative old person loves their country and is mad that college campuses are liberal because it means elites will ruin it.
Everyone’s immortality. They don’t typically make cartoon villains like that.
The framing of OP is specifically about racing just slowly enough that some specific people make the cut[1], which is absolutely a tradeoff between everyone’s lives and those specific people’s immortality. OP is explicitly indifferent about the effects on other people, including those who die sooner and those whose chances might be ruined by moving too fast for safety.
which rests on a possibly-questionable received wisdom that AGI is a sufficient and necessary route to immediate immortality