In economics, “we can model utility as logarithmic in wealth”, even after adding human capital to wealth, feels like a silly asymptotic approximation that obviously breaks down in the other direction as wealth goes to zero and modeled utility to negative infinity.
In cosmology, though, the difference between “humanity only gets a millionth of its light cone” and “humanity goes extinct” actually does feel bigger than the difference between “humanity only gets a millionth of its light cone” and “humanity gets a fifth of its light cone”; not infinitely bigger, but a lot more than you’d expect by modeling marginal utility as a constant as wealth goes to zero.
This is all subjective; others’ feelings may differ.
(I’m also open in theory to valuing an appropriately-complete successor to humanity equally to humanity 1.0, whether the successor is carbon or silicon or whatever, but I don’t see how “appropriately-complete” is likely so I’m ignoring the possibility above.)
In economics, “we can model utility as logarithmic in wealth”, even after adding human capital to wealth, feels like a silly asymptotic approximation that obviously breaks down in the other direction as wealth goes to zero and modeled utility to negative infinity.
In cosmology, though, the difference between “humanity only gets a millionth of its light cone” and “humanity goes extinct” actually does feel bigger than the difference between “humanity only gets a millionth of its light cone” and “humanity gets a fifth of its light cone”; not infinitely bigger, but a lot more than you’d expect by modeling marginal utility as a constant as wealth goes to zero.
This is all subjective; others’ feelings may differ.
(I’m also open in theory to valuing an appropriately-complete successor to humanity equally to humanity 1.0, whether the successor is carbon or silicon or whatever, but I don’t see how “appropriately-complete” is likely so I’m ignoring the possibility above.)