All of Andy McKenzie's Comments + Replies
AMA: Allison Duettmann, Foresight Institute
How do you think that framing a discussion about the effects of future technologies as potentially leading to scenarios of existential hope as opposed to existential risk can be helpful? Or is positing a dichotomy between existential hope and risk sort of missing a key point?
31yThat’s an interesting question and I would love to know more about what key
point you think it’s missing.
I’m the meantime, here’s two things I’d say:
* I do wonder how much the existing heavy focus on specific risks and worst
case scenarios may end up steering us those ways. Christine Peterson recently
gave the steering car analogy, i.e. that you’re not supposed to stop your car
on the side of the highway because drivers automatically steer into it by
looking at it. Positive directions to make progress toward can have the
benefit of enticing more cooperation on exciting shared goals. A related
model is perhaps is Drexler’s talk on Paretotopian Goal Alignment where
points out that as automation and AI raise the stakes of cooperation the
benefits of cooperating for reaping the rewards may increasingly outweigh
costs of non-cooperation leaving them on the table:
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/ea-global-2018-paretotopian-goal-alignment
[https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/ea-global-2018-paretotopian-goal-alignment]
* More concretely, I see differential technology development as a promising way
to account for risks of technologies while proactively building safety and
security enhancing technologies first. What attracted me to Foresight is that
it’s comprised of a highly technical community across various domains who
nevertheless care a lot about creating secure beneficial long term uses of
their applications, so the DTD angle feels like a good fit and framing — at
least for our community. More on DTD:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g6549FAQpQ5xobihj/differential-technological-development
[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g6549FAQpQ5xobihj/differential-technological-development]
Very interesting, thanks for the thoughts!
I realize now that my questions were a bit unclear. I tend to think about the world in terms of trade-offs. So my first question was really about the trade-off of thinking about the future in terms of existential hope vs existential risk.
You already addressed a key upside of thinking in terms of existential hope that I hadn't thought of with your first point, which is that thinking of the future can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, so it's better to have a positive vision of the future than a negative... (read more)