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Su­per-beneficiaries

TagLast edit: 22 Aug 2023 5:37 UTC by alenoach

A super-beneficiary (non-pejorative synonym of utility monster[1]) is “a being that is superhumanly efficient at deriving well-being from resources”.[2]

It is hypothesized that digital minds could in theory be super-beneficiaries. This could happen because digital hardware runs millions of times faster than biological neurons, along with several other optimizations.[2]

Super-beneficiaries pose many ethical challenges :

Resources sharing

From a utilitarian perspective, these super-beneficiaries would have a strong claim over resources. There may still be moral reasons to aim for not letting the entirety of the resources to super-beneficiaries, such as to “hedge against moral error, to appropriately reflect moral pluralism, to account for game-theoretic considerations, or simply as a matter of realpolitik”.[2]

Deontological views are varied and may not care about enormous welfare. But such views are usually insensitive to scale and may not really care anyway about how large-scale resources like other galaxies are used. And some digital minds may still have superhuman moral status and claims over resources depending on the chosen deontological criteria for moral status.[2]

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Hu­mans are util­ity monsters

PhilGoetz16 Aug 2013 21:05 UTC
123 points
216 comments2 min readLW link

Com­ment on “Propo­si­tions Con­cern­ing Digi­tal Minds and So­ciety”

Zack_M_Davis10 Jul 2022 5:48 UTC
99 points
12 comments8 min readLW link

Ar­tifi­cial Utility Mon­sters as Effec­tive Altruism

[deleted]25 Jun 2014 9:52 UTC
22 points
13 comments7 min readLW link

Utili­tar­i­anism Meets Egalitarianism

Scott Garrabrant21 Nov 2022 19:00 UTC
119 points
16 comments6 min readLW link1 review

En­gag­ing with hy­po­thet­i­cals as they are defined

damiensnyder3 Oct 2021 5:22 UTC
15 points
0 comments4 min readLW link

Com­par­ing Utilities

abramdemski14 Sep 2020 20:56 UTC
71 points
31 comments17 min readLW link
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