TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time
Until the Hugging Face / OpenAI swarm thing, I think I deep down felt pretty skeptical that extinction or serious loss of control scenarios were plausible in the next few years.
I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for years, and I remember being freaked out by Yudkowsky’s ‘List of Lethalities’ in 2022, and thinking that this did seem intellectually convincing, and maybe I should do something about it. But it didn...
TL;DR: Don’t worry about any of this, just treat world-splitting the same way you treat classical randomness.
I don’t want to give a full explanation right now, but I don’t think you should be very worried about this.
I think the right way to take many-worlds into account as a utilitarian is to say that your utility over the universal wavefunction is just a weighted sum over Everett branches, with each branch having weight according to the Born rule. If you take this approach, then it adds up to normality and you don’t care about the difference between classical dice and quantum dice.
If you take this approach, then none of the issues you mention come up.
If you instead believe that every Everett branch matters equally regardless of its measure, which is basically what is required for the quantum suicide argument to go through, then your morality ends up being totally incoherent, because the universal wavefunction is nonzero everywhere that isn’t impossible for a geometric reason (eg fermionic exclusion—the wavefunction always has zero amplitude for any configuration with two electrons with the same spin in the same position).
Either way, I don't think there's any good argument that many-worlds implies any of the conclusions you mentioned.
I know a reasonable number of people who have a good understanding of anthropics and QM, and I think all of them agree with me that many-worlds adds up to normality in this way.
You might be interested in looking at theories of anthropics like UDASSA.