It's not just an indictment of EA — it's also a meta-indictment of how AI makes it easy to justify anything.
Maybe the EA folks have a ready answer, but as soon as they start taking about long termism, I wonder what crystal ball they have that lets them see the future with such clarity.
Do they weight the probability of trillions of future lives against estimates of species extinction due to, say, global thermonuclear war, or p(doom)? Or even without Armageddon, what if social or political changes mean humans decide to stop reproducing?
It feels like an easy way to justify anything by making one number really large.
Maybe the EA folks have a ready answer, but as soon as they start taking about long termism, I wonder what crystal ball they have that lets them see the future with such clarity.
Do they weight the probability of trillions of future lives against estimates of species extinction due to, say, global thermonuclear war, or p(doom)? Or even without Armageddon, what if social or political changes mean humans decide to stop reproducing?
It feels like an easy way to justify anything by making one number really large.