I wonder whether the option-value argument here has an additional timing dimension.
You emphasize that flexible resources can be preserved for better-informed future altruists. But waiting may improve not only our information; it may also radically improve the productivity of those resources.
For some interventions, technological progress that is largely exogenous to our own action may make the same objective dramatically cheaper or easier to achieve later. Recent progress in AI-assisted software development is an intuitive example: some projects that required very large teams a few years ago can now be attempted with a fraction of the resources.
This seems to create two opposing time-dependent effects:
Technological leverage from waiting: how much cheaper, easier, or more effective an intervention is expected to become if we delay it.
Opportunity decay from waiting: how much valuable and irreversible opportunity is lost during that delay — for example, people who die, suffer years that cannot be returned to them, developmental windows that close, or preventive opportunities that disappear.
This suggests that cluelessness may partly be an optimal-timing problem rather than simply a choice between near-term and long-term causes.
When technological leverage is expected to grow quickly and the opportunity remains open, preserving flexible resources may dominate committing them now. But when the beneficiaries or the intervention window are perishable, waiting has an irreversible cost even if the eventual technology will be much better.
I would add one qualification: this argument should distinguish exogenous technological progress from progress that depends on doing the intervention now. We cannot justify waiting for a cheaper future technology when today's costly work is part of what creates that future technology.
Could a graded approach incorporate this explicitly — perhaps by treating expected technological leverage and expected opportunity decay as reasons affecting the degree of justification for acting now versus preserving option value?
It seems possible that this would yield a principled reason to prioritize some tractable present harms while deliberately postponing other interventions for better-informed and technologically more capable future agents, without privileging either the present or the future as such.
I wonder whether the option-value argument here has an additional timing dimension.
You emphasize that flexible resources can be preserved for better-informed future altruists. But waiting may improve not only our information; it may also radically improve the productivity of those resources.
For some interventions, technological progress that is largely exogenous to our own action may make the same objective dramatically cheaper or easier to achieve later. Recent progress in AI-assisted software development is an intuitive example: some projects that required very large teams a few years ago can now be attempted with a fraction of the resources.
This seems to create two opposing time-dependent effects:
This suggests that cluelessness may partly be an optimal-timing problem rather than simply a choice between near-term and long-term causes.
When technological leverage is expected to grow quickly and the opportunity remains open, preserving flexible resources may dominate committing them now. But when the beneficiaries or the intervention window are perishable, waiting has an irreversible cost even if the eventual technology will be much better.
I would add one qualification: this argument should distinguish exogenous technological progress from progress that depends on doing the intervention now. We cannot justify waiting for a cheaper future technology when today's costly work is part of what creates that future technology.
Could a graded approach incorporate this explicitly — perhaps by treating expected technological leverage and expected opportunity decay as reasons affecting the degree of justification for acting now versus preserving option value?
It seems possible that this would yield a principled reason to prioritize some tractable present harms while deliberately postponing other interventions for better-informed and technologically more capable future agents, without privileging either the present or the future as such.