What is the longtermist worldview? First — that humanity’s potential future is vast beyond comprehension, that trillions of lives may lie ahead of us, and that we should try to secure and shape that future if possible.Here there’s little disagreement among effective altruists. The catch is the qualifier: “if possible.” When I talk to people working on cash transfers or clean water or accelerating vaccine timelines, their reason for prioritizing those projects over long-term-future ones is approximately never “because future people aren’t of moral importance”; it’s usually “because I don’t think we can predictably affect the lives of future people in the desired direction.”
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- [note::Yeah, I think this is the crux of the longtermist debate: are there specific actions we can take to (reliably) shape the future in 50 years? 100 years? 500 years?]

Under some circumstances. But under which circumstances? How do you know if you’re in them? What share of people who tried to affect the long-term future succeeded, and what share failed? How many others successfully founded institutions that outlived them — but which developed values that had little to do with their own?
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- [note::Progress studies probably has some insights on these questions]

Most well-intentioned, well-conceived plans falter on contact with reality. Every simple problem splinters, on closer examination, into dozens of sub-problems with their own complexities. It has taken exhaustive trial and error and volumes of empirical research to establish even the most basic things about what works and what doesn’t to improve peoples’ lives.
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- [note::Knowing things is really fucking hard!]

it’s hard to claim abolition as a longtermist achievement — an astonishing humanitarian triumph of principled political organizing, yes, but one which mostly justifies itself through the benefits to already-alive enslaved people and their children and grandchildren, not through the benefits to future human civilization.
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Broadly, current methods of training AI systems give them goals that we didn’t directly program in, don’t understand, can’t evaluate and that produce behavior we don’t want. As the systems get more powerful, the fact that we have no way to directly determine their goals (or even understand what they are) is going to go from a major inconvenience to a potentially catastrophic handicap.
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- [note::Great distillation of this]

For this reason, most longtermists working in AI safety are worried about scenarios where humans fail to impart the goals they want to the systems they create. But MacAskill thinks it’s substantially more likely that we’ll end up in a situation where we know how to set AI goals, and set them based on parochial 21st century values — which makes it utterly crucial that we improve our values so that the future we build upon them isn’t dystopian.
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- [note::Different approaches to AI alignment: goals-first approach v.s. values-first approach]

You can try to invent specific things that make extinction less likely, like (in the case of pandemic preparedness) better personal protective equipment and wastewater surveillance. You can identify things that make extinction more likely, such as nuclear proliferation, and combat them. These are still thorny problems that reach across domains and in some respects confuse even the full-time experts who study them, but there are achievable near-term technical goals, and longtermists have some genuine accomplishments to point to in achieving them. In the short term, persuading people to adopt your values is also concrete and doable. Effective altruists do a lot of it, from the campaign against cruelty to animals on factory farms to the efforts to convince people to give more effectively. The hard part is determining whether those changes durably improve the long-term future — and it seems very hard indeed to me, likely because my near-term future predictions differ from MacAskill’s.
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- [note::Consequential effective altruism in a nutshell:

• Do (high impact) things that make bad things less likely
• Combat things make bad things more likely (in ways that are high impact)
• Influence others to adopt values that promote doing good]