I don't think this is as clear of a dichotomy as people think it is. A lot of global catastrophic risk doesn't come from literal extinction because human extinction is very hard. A lot of mundane work on GCR policy involves a wide variety of threat models that are not just extinction.

The value of the future conditional on civilization surviving seems positive to me, but not robustly so. I think the main argument for its being positive is theoretical (e.g., Spreading happiness to the stars seems little harder than just spreading), but the historical/contemporary record is ambiguous.

The value of improving the future seems more robustly positive if it is tractable. I suspect it is not that much less tractable than extinction risk work. I think a lot of AI risk satisfies this goal as well as the x-risk goal for reasons Will MacAskill gives... (read more)

I think there are a lot of thorny definitional issues here that make this set of issues not boil down that nicely to a 1D spectrum. But overall extinction prevention will likely have a far broader coalition supporting it, while making the future large and amazing is far less popular since most people aren't very ambitious with respect to spreading flourishing through the universe, but I tentatively am.

I don't think it's valuable to ensure future moral patients exist for their own sake, and extinction risk reduction only really seems to expectably benefit humans who would otherwise die in an extinction event, who would be in the billions. An astronomical number of future moral patients could have welfare at stake if we don't go extinct, so I'd prioritize them on the basis of their numbers.

See this comment and thread.

If we treat digital minds like current animal livestock, the expected value of the future could be really bad. 

I think increasing the value of good futures is probably higher importance, but much less tractable

Most people have a strong drive to perpetuate humanity. What makes EAs special is that EAs also care about others' suffering. So EAs should focus on trying to make sure the future isn't full of suffering.

Under moral uncertainty, many moral perspectives care much more about averting downsides than producing upsides.

Additionally, tractability is probably higher for extinction-level threats, since they are "absorptive"; decreasing the chance we end up in one gives humanity and their descendants ability to do whatever they figure out is best.

Finally, there is a meaningful sense in which working on improving the future is plagued by questions about moral progress and lock-in of values, and my intuition is that most interventions that take moral progress serious... (read more)

Two major reasons/ considerations:
1- I'm unconvinced of the tractability of non-extinction-risk reducing longtermist interventions. 
2- Perhaps this is self-defeating - but I feel uncomfortable substantively shaping the future in ways that aren't merely making sure it exists. Visions of the future that I would have found un-objectionable a century ago would probably seem bad to me today. In short - this consideration is basically "moral uncertainty". I think extinction-risk reduction is, though not recommended on every moral framework, at least recommended on most. I haven't seen other ideas for shaping the future which are as widely recommended. 

I genuinely have no idea. 

I think human extinction (from ASI) is highly likely to happen, and soon, unless we stop it from being built^[1]

See my comments in the Symposium for further discussion

1. ^{^}

   And that the ASI that wipes us out won't matter morally (to address footnote 2 on the statement)

I think the expected value of the long-term future, in the “business as usual” scenario, is positive. In particular, I anticipate that advanced/transformative artificial intelligence drives technological innovation to solve a lot of world problems (e.g., helping create cell-based meat eventually), and I also think a decent amount of this EV is contained in futures with digital minds and/or space colonization (even though I’d guess it’s unlikely we get to that sort of world). However, I’m very uncertain about these futures—they could just as easily contain ... (read more)

Broadly Agree

Although I might have misunderstood and missed the point of this entire debate, so correct me if that is the case

I just don't believe  changing the future trajectory is tractable in say 50-100 years from now areas like politics, economics, AI welfare etc. I think its a pipe dream. We cannot predict technological, political and economic changes even in the medium term future. These changes may well quickly render our current efforts meaningless in 10-20 years. I think the effect of work we do now which is future focused diminishes in value... (read more)

On the current margin, improving our odds of survival seems much more crucial to the long-term value of civilization. My reason for believing this is that there are some dangerous technologies which I expect will be invented soon, and are more likely to lead to extinction in their early years than later on. Therefore, we should currently spend more effort on ensuring survival, because we will have more time to improve the value of the future after that.

(Counterpoint: ASI is the main technology that might lead to extinction, and the period when it's invented might be equally front-loaded in terms of setting values as it is in terms of extinction risk.)

Depends, if x-risk is small (<5%) and if we expect outsized impact on the future (preventing negative value lock-ins), then the latter seems more important. I'm very unsure about both. 

I have mixed feelings here. But one major practical worry I have about "increasing the value of futures" is that a lot of that looks fairly zero-sum to me. And I'm scared of getting other communities to think this way. 

If we can capture 5% more of the universe for utilitarian aims, for example, that's 5% less from others. 

I think it makes sense for a lot of this to be studied in private, but am less sure about highly public work.

Partly this is because I think “extinction” as defined here is very unlikely (<<1%) to happen this century, which upper bounds the scale of the area. I think most “existential risk” work is not squarely targeted at avoiding literal extinction of all Earth-originating life.

I feel extremely unsure about this one. I'm voting slightly against purely from the perspective of, "wow, there are projects in that direction that feel super neglected".

I'm optimistic about the very best value-increasing research/interventions. But in terms of what would actually be done at the margin, most work that people would do for "value-increasing" reasons would be confused/doomed, I expect (and this is less true for AI safety).

I dunno, by how much? Seems contingent on lots of factors. 

Recent advances in LLMs have led me to update toward believing that we live in the world where alignment is easy (i.e. CEV naturally emerge from LLMs, and future AI agents will be based on understanding and following natural language commands by default), but governance is hard (i.e. AI agents might be co-opted by governments or corporations to lock in humanity in a dystopian future, and the current geopolitical environment, characterized by democratic backsliding, cold war mongering, and an increase in military conflicts including wars of aggression, isn't conducive to robust multilateral governance).

The long-running future seems like it could well be unacceptably awful. From the perspective of a battery hen, it would seem much better that it's distant ancestors were pushed out of an ecological niche before humanity domesticated them. Throwing all our effort into X-risk mitigation without really tackling S-risks in a world of increasing lock-in across domains seems deeply unwise to me. 

This is a question I could easily change my mind on.

The experience of digital minds seems to dominate far future calculations. We can get a lot of value from this, a lot of disvalue, or anything in between.

If we go extinct then we get 0 value from digital minds. This seems bad, but we also avoid the futures where we create them and they suffer. It’s hard to say if we are on track to creating them to flourish or suffer - I think there are arguments on both sides. The futures where we create digital minds may be the ones where we wanted to “use” them, which ... (read more)

It's a tractability issue. In order for these interventions to be worth funding, they should reduce our chance of extinction not just now, but over the long term. And I just haven't seen many examples of projects that seem likely to do that.

This is a difficult one, and both my thoughts and my justifications (especially the few sources I cite) are very incomplete. 

It seems to me for now that existential risk reduction is likely to be negative, as both human and AI-controlled futures could contain immense orders of magnitude more suffering than the current world (and technological developments could also enable more intense suffering, whether in humans or in digital minds). The most salient ethical problems with the extinction of earth-originating intelligent life seem to be the likelihood... (read more)

Intelligence is the only chance of some redemption to the massive suffering probably associated to the emergence of consciousness. 

This is the age of danger, we are the first species on Earth that has figured out morality, so we shall survive at allmost all cost. 

Making people happy is valuable; making happy people is probably not valuable. There is an asymmetry between suffering and happiness because it is more morally important to mitigate suffering than to create happiness.

Far from convinced that continued existence at currently likely wellbeing levels is a good thing

I really don't have a strong view, but I find myself sympathetic to the idea that the world is not great and is getting worse (if you consider non-human animals).

It seems plausible to me we might be approaching a "time of perils' where total x-risk is unacceptably high and will continue to be as we develop powerful AI systems, but might decrease later since we can use AI systems to tackle x-risk (though that seems hard and risky in its own myriad ways).

Broadly think we should still prioritise avoiding catastrophes in this phase, and bet on being able to steer later but low confidence.

The far future, on our current trajectory, seems net negative on average. Reducing extinction risk just multiplies its negative EV. 

I think avoiding existential risk is the most important thing. As long as we can do that and don't have some kind of lock in, then we'll have time to think about and optimize the value of the future.

We could devote 100% of currently available resources to existential risk reduction, live in austerity, and never be finished ensuring our own survival.  However, if increase the value of futures where we survive, we will develop more and more resources that can then be put to existential risk reduction.  People will be not only happier, but also more capable and skilled, when we create a world where people can thrive rather than just survive.  The highest quality futures are the most robust.  

Very worried about AI risk, think short timelines are plausible

I think people overrate how predictable the effect of our actions on the future will be (even though they rate it very low in absolute terms); extinction seem like one of the very few (only?) things that seems like its effects will endure throughout a big part of the future. Still buy the theory that 0-1% of possible value is equally valuable to 98-99%; just about tractability

A higher value future reduces the chances of extinction.  If people value life, they will figure out how to keep it.

While I don't entirely disregard x-risks, I have been unimpressed by the tractability of most interventions, excepting perhaps for bio-security ones.

The prevalent notion of "solving" the alignment problem as though it's a particularly hard math problem strikes me as overly represented, which entails neglecting other, more in-direct safety measures, like stable, transparent and trustworthy institutions, whether political or geopolitical (US-China war means what for AI?).

Relatedly, the harm aversion/moral purity signaling around working in AI companies (espe... (read more)

It seems even more important to avoid futures full of extreme suffering than to avoid extinction.

I think the most likely outcome is not necessarily extinction (I estimate <10% due to AI) but rather an unfulfilled potential. This may be humans simply losing control over the future and becoming mere spectators and AI not being morally significant in some way.

With long timeline and less than 10% probability: Hot take is these are co-dependent - prioritizing only extinction is not feasible. Additionally, does only one human exist while all others die count as non-extinction? What about only a group of humans survive? How should this be selected? It could dangerously/quickly fall back to Fascism. It would only likely benefit the group of people with current low to no suffering risks, which unfortunately correlates to the most wealthy group. When we are "dimension-reducing" the human race to one single point, we i... (read more)

I find it very difficult to determine whether the future will be net-negative or net-positive (when considering humans, factory-farmed animals, wild animals, and possibly artificial sentience). 
This makes it very hard to know whether work on extinction reduction is likely to be positive or not.
I prefer to work on things that aim to move the sign towards "net-positive".

What is the point of securing a future for humanity if that future is net-negative?

We can't work on increasing value if we are dead.

If we avoid extinction, plenty of people will have the time to take care of humanity's future. I'll leave it to them. Both topic have a lot of common ground anyway, like "not messing up with the biosphere" or "keeping control of ASI"