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Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

What kind of work has been done on discounting future hypothetical lives? Kind of like time-value of money, but for future lives. Yes, valuing a future life as identical to a present-day life is compelling, but since it's just a hypothetical life, it seems it should be discounted somehow.

To me it almost just seems like a "different people can have different values" sort of thing. If you want to value current lives more than future lives, you'll just come to different conclusions than someone who believes otherwise, and maybe both sets of conclusions are okay.

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I think the most common view within EA is that future people and matter the same amount as current people, conditional on actually existing. So if you think there is a 50% chance the world will be destroyed by 2200, then you would discount lives in 2200 by 50%.

I definitely agree with your second paragraph, however, and people who value current lives more than future lives will often come to different philosophical conclusions. It's interesting, however, that this frequently doesn't cash out into different beliefs about what we should do today. For example, I think the value of work on pandemic prevention or AI alignment does not depend on multiplying by zillions of potential future people: they're worth doing even just for people alive today.

Ex: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KDjEogAqWNTdddF9g/... :

Let me rephrase this in a deliberately inflammatory way: if you're under ~50, unaligned AI might kill you and everyone you know. Not your great-great-(...)-great-grandchildren in the year 30,000 AD. Not even your children. You and everyone you know. As a pitch to get people to care about something, this is a pretty strong one.

But right now, a lot of EA discussion about this goes through an argument that starts with "did you know you might want to assign your descendants in the year 30,000 AD exactly equal moral value to yourself? Did you know that maybe you should care about their problems exactly as much as you care about global warming and other problems happening today?"

I've also seen it argued that if you get enough future humans spread around the galaxy and into the future it doesn't matter what the discount rate is, their value in aggregate can still positive. This is true in a trivial sense, but if I'm not discounting the lives of hypothetical transhumans orbiting Alpha Centurai eleven centuries from now down to zero, maybe I shouldn't discount down to zero the value of other purely hypothetical lives (or "lives") such as infinite copies of a self-aware general AI system trained on twenty-first century human ethics or the long-lived and trouble-free existence of my grandchildren as AI pets either...

Seven billion (or even a couple of million) humans in the world today are obviously a sufficient rationale to pay attention to existential threats or stuff that could blow up in our faces including pandemics, climate changes and AI systems, but proponents of actions with apparently vanishingly small probabilities of improving safety tend to need to invoke gazillions to justify prioritising them over tangible solutions to the problems of millions in Bayesian/utilitarian framework.

> I definitely agree with your second paragraph, however, and people who value current lives more than future lives will often come to different philosophical conclusions.

Trying to sidestep common arguments about the personalities, but I guess an example would be an ideal-version-of-Bill-Gates, and an ideal-version-of-Elon-Musk. Gates Foundation mission statement seems more weighted to current lives, while Musk is more oriented toward multi-planetary existence of future generations. Still some overlap though, Musk's can also be argued to be relevant for current generations.

It's a whole subfield, 'population ethics'. A lot of effective altruists revere Derik Parfit, a rather staid Oxford philosopher who effectively founded the subject.

I don't know how much work has been done there but I think most people just do this intuitively, right? I mean when we make decisions, how often are we really thinking of the downstream effect that they will have many generations in the future. I'd say the notable exception is climate which is an area many people seem concerned about for future generations (although I'm not sure how much of it is actual concern versus the idea of telling old Senators who won't see the impact of climate change to at least think about their grandchildren which just seems like good marketing/advocacy).

There's some stuff like https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/... and https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-da..., but the main work is in bullying nerds on the internet.

It is called risk and humans are risk averse.

There is always a risk your company doesn't become the next unicorn.

There is always a risk your society fails to grow exponentially for two thousand years. Our current track record is that exponential growth happens until it stops, which is pretty bad news for anyone whose math assumes that exponential growth never takes a break.

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