Everything you need to know about contemporary debates surrounding the extinction of humanity, in one accessible article! Plus, an example of some recent bad scholarship on this topic. (5,300 words)
The lack of definitions and polysemous terms makes me think about how we use terms like "artificial intelligence." In general, I think a lot of arguments are unproductive when the definitions of what we're arguing over aren't the same.
Caring about "terminal extinction" seem to be contradictory with having an equivalence view. How is one supposed to graph the badness of the situation in proportion of the fraction of humanity that voluntarily exercise their morphological freedom to become 'posthumans'?
I wonder if the helpful distinction between “going extinct” and “being extinct” exposes something deeper—
—I think, psychologically, there are two different kinds of future. There is “the future,” which is a sort of abstract place like Narnia, or the idea of a country we’ve never been. And then there is “the future,” which is the world you expect to be in if you wait around for long enough.
I suspect a lot of discourse in AI generally breaks down because things from the abstract future have shown up in the grounded one, and people struggle to articulate why this seems wrong to us. On the face of it, of course things we expect in the future should show up in the present if we wait long enough— but I think this is a bit like coming here to Scotland and *actually finding* loads of bearded men in kilts tossing cabers atop the Loch Ness Monster. There is a category violation in how we perceive the world.
So “being extinct” is a thought about an abstract world, and “going extinct” is about the one where you eat eggs and buy a new rug. The dissonance comes when concepts which seemed like they were in the abstract world crash into the everyday far too quickly, and when people realise arguments like “maybe it’s a good thing if all humanity is rendered into oil” are being applied in the non-abstract way— as in “I can’t go on holiday in 2030, babes, I’ll be too busy being rendered into oil”
Still reading through the entire post, but I've noticed in that thought experiment that you've not covered the situation where the person who eliminated all but 1 billion persons is the WORSE situation, because, like…
You've killed 10 billion people, and you've subjected 1 billion people to the trauma of witnessing the death and extermination of 10 billion people.
Like, World B is bad, too — but, like… no one's there to pick up the pieces of losing those closest to you (VERY likely in this circumstance, since you've exterminated 10 out of 11 people), or dealing with survivor's guilt of surviving such a disaster, what with everyone being, you know, dead. Like, I guess we're assuming that after the 10 billion deaths, there are no more deaths from the eradication of over 90% of the world's labor force, with the resulting deaths from starvation and disease, but, like… even at the best estimations people in World A would be more PROFOUNDLY messed up than World B, where everyone's too preoccupied to be traumatized by the simple expedience of being dead.
Like, there's been so much literature about the legacies of trauma and horror from genocide that even the survivors carry and pass on to their children. You don't even need to consider the “further-loss” view. I'd wager that the equivalency theory people would argue that almost but not entirely wiping out humanity just… inflicts a LOT of trauma on the survivors, trauma that would be passed on for GENERATIONS. Being alive means you get the opportunity to suffer that trauma. Sure, World A could provide more potential for existence, but like… they have to also experience and re-experience that trauma of going through the near-extinction event.
Yeah, even if you Thanos-snap people. Actually, even THAT example there was a lot of trauma (we got to see Captain America go through group therapy for grief), which got complicated because it got reversed in a subsequent movie and the entirety of the in-universe franchise had to grapple with the return of people who had, previously, disappeared from existence, but now were back, no worse from wear. But that's like… superhero fiction revolving-door of mortality crap, so nevermind.
The lack of definitions and polysemous terms makes me think about how we use terms like "artificial intelligence." In general, I think a lot of arguments are unproductive when the definitions of what we're arguing over aren't the same.
Caring about "terminal extinction" seem to be contradictory with having an equivalence view. How is one supposed to graph the badness of the situation in proportion of the fraction of humanity that voluntarily exercise their morphological freedom to become 'posthumans'?
I wonder if the helpful distinction between “going extinct” and “being extinct” exposes something deeper—
—I think, psychologically, there are two different kinds of future. There is “the future,” which is a sort of abstract place like Narnia, or the idea of a country we’ve never been. And then there is “the future,” which is the world you expect to be in if you wait around for long enough.
I suspect a lot of discourse in AI generally breaks down because things from the abstract future have shown up in the grounded one, and people struggle to articulate why this seems wrong to us. On the face of it, of course things we expect in the future should show up in the present if we wait long enough— but I think this is a bit like coming here to Scotland and *actually finding* loads of bearded men in kilts tossing cabers atop the Loch Ness Monster. There is a category violation in how we perceive the world.
So “being extinct” is a thought about an abstract world, and “going extinct” is about the one where you eat eggs and buy a new rug. The dissonance comes when concepts which seemed like they were in the abstract world crash into the everyday far too quickly, and when people realise arguments like “maybe it’s a good thing if all humanity is rendered into oil” are being applied in the non-abstract way— as in “I can’t go on holiday in 2030, babes, I’ll be too busy being rendered into oil”
Still reading through the entire post, but I've noticed in that thought experiment that you've not covered the situation where the person who eliminated all but 1 billion persons is the WORSE situation, because, like…
You've killed 10 billion people, and you've subjected 1 billion people to the trauma of witnessing the death and extermination of 10 billion people.
Like, World B is bad, too — but, like… no one's there to pick up the pieces of losing those closest to you (VERY likely in this circumstance, since you've exterminated 10 out of 11 people), or dealing with survivor's guilt of surviving such a disaster, what with everyone being, you know, dead. Like, I guess we're assuming that after the 10 billion deaths, there are no more deaths from the eradication of over 90% of the world's labor force, with the resulting deaths from starvation and disease, but, like… even at the best estimations people in World A would be more PROFOUNDLY messed up than World B, where everyone's too preoccupied to be traumatized by the simple expedience of being dead.
Like, there's been so much literature about the legacies of trauma and horror from genocide that even the survivors carry and pass on to their children. You don't even need to consider the “further-loss” view. I'd wager that the equivalency theory people would argue that almost but not entirely wiping out humanity just… inflicts a LOT of trauma on the survivors, trauma that would be passed on for GENERATIONS. Being alive means you get the opportunity to suffer that trauma. Sure, World A could provide more potential for existence, but like… they have to also experience and re-experience that trauma of going through the near-extinction event.
Yeah, even if you Thanos-snap people. Actually, even THAT example there was a lot of trauma (we got to see Captain America go through group therapy for grief), which got complicated because it got reversed in a subsequent movie and the entirety of the in-universe franchise had to grapple with the return of people who had, previously, disappeared from existence, but now were back, no worse from wear. But that's like… superhero fiction revolving-door of mortality crap, so nevermind.