Do you think CEV / fAI will include concern for animals and things like not simulating or spreading wild animal suffering throughout the universe? If there remain doubts, then spreading memes for people to care more about animal suffering might be very important too!
I think most humans’ volition does include concern for animals, and a CEV AI of the kind MIRI wants to eventually create would be an astronomically good thing. It would probably turn the light cone into computronium full of blissful posthumans, wiping out most if not all darwinian nature it ran into, just because you can tile the universe more densely with people if you put them in computers. Posthumans would be much more computationally expensive than the simplest minds capable of happiness, so they would be packed much less densely and there would be much less happiness than a utilitronium future, but still quite a lot of it.
Spreading memes for people to care about animals does indeed have the potential to be a very good thing, especially because it’s potentially useful in all of the futures where humanity decides what happens, not just ones where AI is the biggest existential risk (or close to the biggest). But if you are donating small amounts of money relative to the money already going into a certain effort though, each dollar is probably roughly as effective as the last, so a small advantage in the effectiveness of one effort over another means that that effort is the only one you should be donating to. Unless you are very rich, you probably don’t want to donate some money to one cause, and some to another.
And as it stands, I think something like paperclipping is the most likely future, though.
Do you think CEV / fAI will include concern for animals and things like not simulating or spreading wild animal suffering throughout the universe? If there remain doubts, then spreading memes for people to care more about animal suffering might be very important too!
I think most humans’ volition does include concern for animals, and a CEV AI of the kind MIRI wants to eventually create would be an astronomically good thing. It would probably turn the light cone into computronium full of blissful posthumans, wiping out most if not all darwinian nature it ran into, just because you can tile the universe more densely with people if you put them in computers. Posthumans would be much more computationally expensive than the simplest minds capable of happiness, so they would be packed much less densely and there would be much less happiness than a utilitronium future, but still quite a lot of it.
Spreading memes for people to care about animals does indeed have the potential to be a very good thing, especially because it’s potentially useful in all of the futures where humanity decides what happens, not just ones where AI is the biggest existential risk (or close to the biggest). But if you are donating small amounts of money relative to the money already going into a certain effort though, each dollar is probably roughly as effective as the last, so a small advantage in the effectiveness of one effort over another means that that effort is the only one you should be donating to. Unless you are very rich, you probably don’t want to donate some money to one cause, and some to another.
And as it stands, I think something like paperclipping is the most likely future, though.