Cross-posted from my website.
In the far future, why would people use up precious resources recreating wild-animal suffering, when they could do so many other things with those resources instead?
That argument is an important reason to expect aligned ASI to produce a future that's okay for animals, even if it's narrowly focused on human welfare and doesn't care about animals at all. This is an old argument, but I couldn't find any source that cleanly lays it out, so that's what I will do in this post. I'm not confident that this argument is decisive, but I will simply present it without further commentary.
The argument rests on these premises:
- Wild animal suffering is the predominant source of suffering in today's world, and that's bad.
- Longtermism is correct.
- There is not an overwhelming asymmetry between suffering and flourishing (if there were an overwhelming asymmetry, then we wouldn't care if the future has much less suffering than happiness).
By assumption, we are talking about a world where ASI is aligned, but isn't specifically aligned to the welfare of all sentient beings. It addresses the suffering of animals, but does not preclude risks of astronomical suffering.
The argument goes:
Most of the absolute expected utility of the future (positive or negative) comes from worlds where ASI hyper-optimizes for some goal or set of goals. In the long run, the harm of present-day animal suffering is swamped by the distant future outcomes where civilization spreads to every habitable planet in the accessible universe. The fear is that those planets would be filled with wild animal suffering (or something even worse); the hope is that they would be filled with flourishing beings.
Distant-future humans (or transhumans) would want to prioritize their own flourishing and the flourishing of their friends, family, and descendants. An aligned ASI would aggressively organize galactic resources to meet that goal.
Many humans value nature. Would future civilization spread wild animal suffering across the universe to satisfy humans' desire for natural beauty? Probably not. Humans' desire for nature competes with many other desires; in a finite accessible universe, tradeoffs must be made. If wild animal suffering dominates human flourishing in the welfare calculus, it must be because a large portion of the universe's resources is dedicated to recreating nature, which means those resources are not spent on things humans want.
Revealed preferences show that people usually trade off nature against other things they want. Look at what percentage of earth's land was untouched by humans 200 or 100 years ago compared to today. The conservationist movement is fighting an uphill battle. It's doubtful that humans will dedicate a significant percent of the universe's resources to wild animals when those resources could be used to produce goods that people value more directly.
In addition, nature is not suffering-maximizing. If humans (or ASI acting on behalf of humans) strongly optimize for flourishing, then they will shape the accessible universe into a form that maximizes human well-being for humans. A priori, a universe optimized for flourishing ought to contain more positive utility than a nature-filled universe would contain negative utility—the former is highly optimized, and the latter contains suffering only incidentally.
For the upside to be larger than the downside, we don't need to make hedonium: it would be sufficient to fill the accessible universe with human-like minds. Transhumans would surely not want to preserve human bodies exactly as they exist today. Future improvements to the human form could, among other things, make bodies far more metabolically efficient, so that the flourishing per unit of energy is greatly increased.