“It seems to me that in a Big World, the people who already exist in your region have a much stronger claim on your charity than babies who have not yet been born into your region in particular.”
This doesn’t make sense to me. A superintelligence could:
A superintelligence could create a semi-random plausible human brain emulation de novo, and whatever this emulation was, it would be the continuation of some set of human lives.
A superintelligence could conduct simulations to explore the likely distribution of minds across the multiverse, as well as the degree to which emulations continuing their lives (in desirable fashions) would serve its altruistic goals. Vast numbers of copies could then be run accordingly, and the costs of exploratory simulation would be negligible by comparison, so there would be little advantage to continuing the lives of beings within our causal region as opposed to entities discovered in exploratory simulation.
If we’re only concerned about proportions within ‘extended-beings,’ then there’s more bang for the buck in running emulations of rare and exotic beings (fewer emulations are required to change their proportions). The mere fact that we find current people to exist suggests anthropically that they are relatively common (and thus that it’s expensive to change their proportions) , so current local people would actually be neglected almost entirely by your sort of Big World average utilitarian.
“It seems to me that in a Big World, the people who already exist in your region have a much stronger claim on your charity than babies who have not yet been born into your region in particular.”
This doesn’t make sense to me. A superintelligence could:
A superintelligence could create a semi-random plausible human brain emulation de novo, and whatever this emulation was, it would be the continuation of some set of human lives.
A superintelligence could conduct simulations to explore the likely distribution of minds across the multiverse, as well as the degree to which emulations continuing their lives (in desirable fashions) would serve its altruistic goals. Vast numbers of copies could then be run accordingly, and the costs of exploratory simulation would be negligible by comparison, so there would be little advantage to continuing the lives of beings within our causal region as opposed to entities discovered in exploratory simulation.
If we’re only concerned about proportions within ‘extended-beings,’ then there’s more bang for the buck in running emulations of rare and exotic beings (fewer emulations are required to change their proportions). The mere fact that we find current people to exist suggests anthropically that they are relatively common (and thus that it’s expensive to change their proportions) , so current local people would actually be neglected almost entirely by your sort of Big World average utilitarian.