An agent with no intrinsic utility discounting doesn’t care whether it starts an exponential investment now, or travels to a zillion years in the past and does its investing then. Either way ends up with the same total assets after any given amount of subjective time. (This assumes you can’t just chuck some money through the time machine and instantly end up with a zillion year’s interest. And that you aren’t using the time machine to avoid the end of the universe or some other time limit on future investment. And that you aren’t doing anything else interesting with it, like building a PSPACE oracle. I don’t think the original statement was about those.)
Whereas an agent with intrinsic discounting would rather live in a universe where the clock says “a zillion BC” than “2009 AD”, even if the situations are otherwise identical.
An agent with no intrinsic utility discounting doesn’t care whether it starts an exponential investment now, or travels to a zillion years in the past and does its investing then. Either way ends up with the same total assets after any given amount of subjective time. (This assumes you can’t just chuck some money through the time machine and instantly end up with a zillion year’s interest. And that you aren’t using the time machine to avoid the end of the universe or some other time limit on future investment. And that you aren’t doing anything else interesting with it, like building a PSPACE oracle. I don’t think the original statement was about those.)
Whereas an agent with intrinsic discounting would rather live in a universe where the clock says “a zillion BC” than “2009 AD”, even if the situations are otherwise identical.