According to me (utility function, etc) it's required you have kids. Only in the 2.X statistical sense though, but if not what's the point? You can't condition all your problems out, but you at least have to play to not lose.
However, could we say that "you at least have to play to not lose" is a particularly selfish reason for having children?
Here, "Playing" is making sure the parents will have caregivers, not that the children will live happy.
If the current situation is not worrying enough to rule out having happy kids, what would be the threshold? (Not a rhetorical question)
There is no threshold. Yes, I know Yudkowsky's position, not even there.
> Here, 'Playing' is making sure the parents will have caregivers, not that the children will live happy.
Parents having caregivers hardly comes into it at all.
For me, it does, an awful lot. Being a caregiver to my parents has implied a lot of existential suffering and emotional agony. Think about it: the people who raised you are going to die slowly and perhaps painfully and you are going to see it without being able to do anything. I feel I would be very cruel by giving that future to a child I love.
If you widen out to society, yeah, there are other people who will come after us, maybe we can have purpose in helping those people to survive even if they're not our kids. Humans evolved as a collective, there are parts of our DNA that exist to help the group even if it means we ourselves don't have kids. Evolution is a much more complicated thing than just specifying exactly what genes -you- pass on.
All of us are descended from billions of years of ancestors (long before humans) that were motivated to reproduce. Those who didn't left none of their genes behind (other than ones they might have shared with relatives).
That's exactly what "losing" means, in the evolutionary sense.
In the case of humans... Why do you think there has always been a part of society that seems predisposed to violence and nationalism. It's not beneficial to the individual to go get in fights, but if it keeps the group alive then it's advantageous. (Note, this is not a license to be a violent nationalist asshole, but this is the internet so...) Similarly, autism and ADHD. There are very real theories that those conditions were beneficial to early society even if they were detrimental to mating because it's helpful to have people around who are hyper focused and hyper unfocused.
So yeah, helping pass on your relative's genes, however distant, is still part of the game.
It may be too early for political action, but perhaps is not too early for writing and reflecting, and for coming up with theories about how the near future may look like, and sharing them with the world.
If things turn really dire, there is always that turbid matter our advanced culture forbids us to reach out for: violence and revolutions. In other words, if it is the AIs or us, be it because the AIs are outright evil or because our economic systems make them evil, then we can always choose “us” and resort to forceful or even violent corrections.
I assume you are thinking deontological ethics, virtue ethics, etc vs utilitarianism, but non-benthamite utility functions exist. Actually, if they didn't I assume a lot of AI doomers would be less doomy, as quite a few of them are utilitarians.
I appreciate that the standard definition includes a term about "for the greatest number". But you're still defining an ethical utility function which you then seek to maximize.
That your utility function may be off model from the most doctrinaire possible interpretation of the theory does not seem to me the same as saying this is not an example of the theory.
The same could be said of effective altruism, which is anyway just the prosperity-gospel version of utilitarianism. That one should be doing utilitarianism badly does not mean one is not doing utilitarianism at all.
(Did you mean to reply to your comment rather than mine?)
I think it's honest, as it really forces you to make a distinction between good (what should be) and real (what is). "Should" goes into the utility function, "is" goes into the world model. I'd honestly recommend giving it a shot if you have free time.
> I doubt that; this and your prior comment are the second and third time I've seen it in eleven years of active participation here.
It's the anti-flame war/spam thing kicking in. I'm manually responding to the "wrong post" but that's pretty much fine.
I'm familiar with Hume. The is-ought distinction has value, but is orthogonal to utilitarianism, if not explicitly opposed.
Sure, I don't want to get into a definitional argument. However, any VNM utility function can be the exact opposite of anything you propose as good, just by inverting the comparison order. If you have numerical outcome scores that could be as easy as my score =: 0 - your score
> (Did you mean to reply to your comment rather than mine?)
It's a HN thing.
> It's a HN thing.
I doubt that; this and your prior comment are the second and third time I've seen it in eleven years of active participation here. Are you using some kind of extension or script to augment the UI? If so, I strongly suspect that is causing it.