This is a crosspost from my blog post.

Many in the EAs are concerned about the risk of extinction this century, but, in order for these risks to be concerning, we have to be convinced that humanity is worth saving in the first place. In this post, I’m going to argue that this is the case by giving arguments for and against why we should expect humanity’s net impact on the world to be positive or negative. I will specifically use a welfare focused view, meaning that I’ll be concerned with how much happiness and suffering we should expect to see in the future.

Reasons Humanity’s Net Impact Might Be Positive

1. Humans will develop technologies that reduce suffering and increase happiness.

Since most people don’t want to suffer and most people like to be happy, I think it’s reasonable to think that humanity will work towards developing technology that reduces suffering and increases happiness. If we become technologically advanced enough, we might even technologies that radically reduce suffering and enable extraordinary bliss.

It’s hard to speculate on what future humans or their creations will do, but I suspect that, if they experience suffering and joy, they will likely make use of these technologies to reduce their suffering and increase their joy.

Additionally, if future humans are particularly altruistic, they may also use this technology to reduce the suffering of wild animals. If this occurred, we could expect the future to possess far more happiness than suffering.

1. The futures that are highest in value will likely also be positive in value.

It seems, to me, that the futures that are highest in value will likely also be positive in value since, in order to increase the value of the future, we must have more technological development. And, if we do more technological development, we might develop technologies that reduce suffering and increase happiness.

For instance, if in the future, there are one trillion humans that are able to simultaneously live on Earth or vastly more living across the stars, we should probably expect that they are also extraordinary technological advancements that could produce extremely high welfare.

Similarly, if we are able to create artificial beings, they might rapidly outnumber us since it could be far easier to make artificial beings than to make humans. Although it’s not guaranteed that such beings would have positive welfare, I see little reason that we would make them have negative welfare but good reason to think that we might give them positive welfare. This is because it seems like only sadists would want to make digital beings suffer, whereas all non-sadists would want either for that not to occur or for the opposite of it to occur. Additionally, considering that beings don’t like to suffer, I suspect that sadism will be selected out of future populations.

1. Territorial expansion could reduce wild animal suffering.

It could be that animals in the wild have net negative lives. When humans make buildings and do agriculture, they force wild animals off land, ultimately reducing the world’s carrying capacity for wild animals and reducing wild animal suffering overall. Humans, as a species, have continued to take up more and more land as time has progressed. If this trend continues, we could imagine that there will be virtually no animals in the wild to speak of, which would reduce wild animal suffering substantially.

1. Factory farming will likely end soon.

It seems like, in the future, more energy efficient ways of developing meat-like products will be developed since factory farming wastes energy by growing organisms with features other than meat. As such, I think we should reasonably expect that, if technological development continues, farm animal suffering will soon end because we will figure out how to create meat-like products with raising sentient beings.

1. Humans are a particularly altruistic species.

I think it’s worth pointing out that humans actively seek to do morally correct behavior and voluntarily help others with no expectation of reciprocity. As such, I think we have good reason to think that, if humans stay similar to how they are now, they will guide the future to a more morally just place.

Reasons Humanity’s Net Impact Might Be Negative

1. Humans have created vast amounts of suffering historically.

Humans have been responsible for a vast amount of suffering historically. For instance, humans have done genocides, slavery, and oppression for millennia. Additionally, over the last century, humans have even done the atrocity of factory farming.

1. Some of the most powerful people in history have been actively sadistic.

In William MacAskill’s What We Owe The Future, he points out that, “Although they are rare in the population as a whole, malevolent, sadistic, or psychopathic actors may be disproportionately likely to gain political power. Many dictators have exhibited such traits aside from Mao and Hitler, including Genghis Khan, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Mussolini, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, François Duvalier, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Idi Amin, and Pol Pot.” If it turns out that the future selects for sadistic leaders, the world could be horrible on scales that are difficult to even imagine.

1. We may create negative outcomes that nobody wants as a result of system dynamics.

In Scott Alexander’s article “Meditations on Moloch,” he discussed a myriad of ways in which negative outcomes can occur that no one actually wants as a result of system dynamics. For instance, in the Malthusian trap, people initially have a bounty of resources available to everyone. As a result, they all have as many children as they want. But, as a result of this, eventually there are too many people and not enough resources so everyone eventually lives in a state of constant hunger and people often die early. Fortunately, as Alexander points out, if people are able to sufficiently coordinate, they can often avoid these outcomes. In a world where people are increasingly educated and have technology that allows for more complex negotiating, I’m optimistic that we will be able to coordinate our way out of these sorts of outcomes.

1. We may accidentally cause vast amounts of suffering.

I find this generally unlikely, but I think it’s worth pointing out that we could accidentally create vast amounts of suffering. For instance, if future humans sought to create environments similar to our ancestral one, they might terraform planets across the universe, creating wild animal suffering on a tremendous scale. Similarly, if some part of creating digital beings involves causing them to suffer but we don’t know this, we may accidentally create suffering that far outweighs the suffering of our own species.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m quite optimistic that humanity will have a positive impact on the future since it seems like the reasons in the first part of this post outweigh the reasons in the second.