I mentioned a few times that some and perhaps most x-risk work may have negative value ex post. I go into detail how work may likely be negative in footnote 13.
It seems somewhat unreasonable to me, however, to be virtually 100% confident that x-risk work is as likely to have zero or negative value ex ante as it is to have positive value.
I tried to include the extreme difficulty of influencing the future by giving work relatively low efficacy, i.e. in the moderate case 100,000 (hopefully extremely competent) people working on x-risk for 1000 years only cause a 10% reduction of x-risk in expectation, in other words effectively a 90% likelihood of failure. In the pessimistic estimate 100,000 people working on it for 10,000 years only cause a 1% reduction in x-risk.
Perhaps this could be a few orders of magnitude lower, say 1 billion people working on x-risk for 1 million years only reduce existential risk by 1/1trillion in expectation (if these numbers seem absurd you can use lower numbers of people or time, but this increases the number of lives saved per unit of work). This would make the pessimistic estimate have very low value, but the moderate estimate would still be highly valuable (10^18 lives per minute of work.)
All that is to say, I think that while you could be much more pessimistic, I don’t think it changes the conclusion by that much, except in the pessimistic case—unless you have extremely high certainty that we cannot predict what is likely to help prevent x-risk. I did give two more pessimistic scenarios in the appendix which I say may be plausible under certain assumptions, such as 100% certainty that X-risk is inevitable. I will add that this case is also valid if you assume a 100% certainty that we can’t predict what will reduce X-risk, as I think this is a valid point.
Interesting objections!
I mentioned a few times that some and perhaps most x-risk work may have negative value ex post. I go into detail how work may likely be negative in footnote 13.
It seems somewhat unreasonable to me, however, to be virtually 100% confident that x-risk work is as likely to have zero or negative value ex ante as it is to have positive value.
I tried to include the extreme difficulty of influencing the future by giving work relatively low efficacy, i.e. in the moderate case 100,000 (hopefully extremely competent) people working on x-risk for 1000 years only cause a 10% reduction of x-risk in expectation, in other words effectively a 90% likelihood of failure. In the pessimistic estimate 100,000 people working on it for 10,000 years only cause a 1% reduction in x-risk.
Perhaps this could be a few orders of magnitude lower, say 1 billion people working on x-risk for 1 million years only reduce existential risk by 1/1trillion in expectation (if these numbers seem absurd you can use lower numbers of people or time, but this increases the number of lives saved per unit of work). This would make the pessimistic estimate have very low value, but the moderate estimate would still be highly valuable (10^18 lives per minute of work.)
All that is to say, I think that while you could be much more pessimistic, I don’t think it changes the conclusion by that much, except in the pessimistic case—unless you have extremely high certainty that we cannot predict what is likely to help prevent x-risk. I did give two more pessimistic scenarios in the appendix which I say may be plausible under certain assumptions, such as 100% certainty that X-risk is inevitable. I will add that this case is also valid if you assume a 100% certainty that we can’t predict what will reduce X-risk, as I think this is a valid point.