Yeah so I was implicitly assuming that even the fastest civilizations don't "easily" reach the absolute maximum physically possible speed such that what determines their speed is the ratio resources spent on spreading as fast as possible [1] : resources spent on other things (e.g., being careful and quiet).

I don't remember thinking about whether this assumption is warranted however. If we expect all civs to reach this maximum physically possible speed without needing to dedicate 100% of their resources to this, this drastically dampens the grabby selection effect I mentioned above.

[1] which if maximized would make the civilization loud by default in absence of resources spent on avoiding this I assume. (harfe in this thread gives a good specific instance backing up this assumption)

Interesting! Fwiw, the best argument I can immediately think of against silent cosmic rulers being likely/plausible is that we should expect these to expand slower than typical grabby aliens and therefore be less "fit" and selected against (see my Grabby Values Selection Thesis -- although it seems to be more about expansion strategies than about values here). 

Not sure how strong this argument is though. The selection effect might be relatively small (e.g. because being quiet is cheap or because non-quiet aliens get blown up by the quiet ones that were "hiding"?).

Interesting, thanks for sharing your thoughts on the process and stuff! (And happy to see the post published!) :)

Interesting, makes sense! Thanks for the clarification and for your thoughts on this! :)

 If I want to prove that technological progress generally correlates with methods that involve more suffering, yes! Agreed.

But while the post suggests that this is a possibility, its main point is that suffering itself is not inefficient, such that there is no reason to expect progress and methods that involve less suffering to correlate by default (much weaker claim).

This makes me realize that the crux is perhaps this below part more than the claim we discuss above. 

While I tentatively think the “the most efficient solutions to problems don’t seem like they involve suffering” claim is true if we limit ourselves to the present and the past, I think it is false once we consider the long-term future, which makes the argument break apart.

Future solutions are more efficient insofar as they overcome past limitations. In the relevant examples that are enslaved humans and exploited animals, suffering itself is not a limiting factor. It is rather the physical limitations of those biological beings, relative to machines that could do a better job at their tasks.

I don't see any inevitable dependence between their suffering and these physical limitations. If human slaves and exploited animals were not sentient, this wouldn't change the fact that machines would do a better job.

Sorry for the confusion and thanks for pushing back! Helps me clarify what the claims made in this post imply and don't imply. :)

I do not mean to argue that the future will be net negative. (I even make this disclaimer twice in the post, aha.) :)

I simply argue that the convergence between efficiency and methods that involve less suffering argument in favor of assuming it'll be positive is unsupported.

There are many other arguments/considerations to take into account to assess the sign of the future.

Thanks!

Are you thinking about this primarily in terms of actions that autonomous advanced AI systems will take for the sake of optimisation?

Hum... not sure. I feel like my claims are very weak and true even in future worlds without autonomous advanced AIs.

"One large driver of humanity's moral circle expansion/moral improvement has been technological progress which has reduced resource competition and allowed groups to expand concern for others' suffering without undermining themselves".

Agreed but this is more similar to argument (A) fleshed out in this footnote, which is not the one I'm assailing in this post.

Thanks Vasco! Perhaps a nitpick but suffering still doesn't seem to be the limiting factor per se, here. If farmed animals were philosophical zombies (i.e., were not sentient but still had the exact same needs), that wouldn't change the fact that one needs to keep them in conditions that are ok enough to be able to make a profit out of them. The limiting factor is their physical needs, not their suffering itself. Do you agree?

I think the distinction is important because it suggests that suffering itself appears as a limiting factor only insofar as it is strong evidence of physical needs that are not met. And while both strongly correlate in the present, I argue that we should expect this to change.

Interesting, thanks Ben! I definitely agree that this is the crux. 

I'm sympathetic to the claim that "this algorithm would be less efficient than quicksort" and that this claim is generalizable.^[1] However, if true, I think it only implies that suffering is -- by default -- inefficient as a motivation for an algorithm. 

Right after making my crux claim, I reference some of Tobias Baumann's (2022a, 2022b) work which gives some examples of how significant amounts of suffering may be instrumentally useful/required in cases such as scientific experiments where sentience plays a key role (where the suffering is not due to it being a strong motivator for an efficient algorithm, but for other reasons). Interestingly, his "incidental suffering" examples are more similar to the factory farming and human slavery examples than to the Quicksort example.

1. ^{^}

   To be fair, it's been a while since I've read about stuff like suffering subroutines (see, e.g., Tomasik 2019) and its plausibility, and people might have raised considerations going against that claim.

Thanks a lot, Alene! That's motivating :)