You seem obsessed with infinity :-( What about the universal heat death? Forget about infinity—just consider whether we want to discount on a scale of 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 10,000 years—or whatever.
I think “ideal” short-term discounting is potentially problematical. Once we are out to discounting on a billion year timescale, that is well into the “how many angels dance on the head of a pin” territory—from my perspective.
Some of the causes of instrumental discounting look very difficult to overcome—even for a superintelligence. The future naturally gets discounted to the extent that you can’t predict and control it—and many phenomena (e.g. the weather) are very challenging to predict very far into the future—unless you can bring them actively under your control.
Are you claiming that the consequence of actions made today must inevitably have negligible effect upon the distant future?
No, The idea was that predicting those consequences is often hard—and it gets harder the further out you go. Long term predictions thus often don’t add much to what short-term ones give you.
You seem obsessed with infinity :-( What about the universal heat death? Forget about infinity—just consider whether we want to discount on a scale of 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 10,000 years—or whatever.
I think “ideal” short-term discounting is potentially problematical. Once we are out to discounting on a billion year timescale, that is well into the “how many angels dance on the head of a pin” territory—from my perspective.
Some of the causes of instrumental discounting look very difficult to overcome—even for a superintelligence. The future naturally gets discounted to the extent that you can’t predict and control it—and many phenomena (e.g. the weather) are very challenging to predict very far into the future—unless you can bring them actively under your control.
No, The idea was that predicting those consequences is often hard—and it gets harder the further out you go. Long term predictions thus often don’t add much to what short-term ones give you.
Flippantly: we’re going to have billions of years to find a solution to that problem.