There’s a mix of normative and neutrally-factual questions here. The basic normative question is, how should we feel about life? While the factual questions are more like, what are people feeling and why?
Diving straight into the normative: I arrived at the combination of transhumanism and antinatalism long ago, and I still think it’s valid, in fact more valid than ever, since I believe in “short timelines” for superintelligence. I always regarded transhumanism as the more important of the two and something to advocate publicly, whereas antinatalism was more a private matter. This was both a pragmatic choice—campaigning for antinatalism is likely to arouse fierce resistance—and also a matter of priority: I didn’t despair of existence as such, I simply regarded our current human condition as not to be tolerated (let alone imposed upon a new life created by choice); but also as something to which we do not need to be resigned.
At a more abstract level, I also abide by the views of Celia Green, according to which one’s existential feelings should proceed from an assumption of possibility and uncertainty, since that is our actual epistemic situation; but this may require a certain detachment or emotional distance from the concrete particulars of your experience.
There might have been a time when I was more interested in arguing on behalf of these views for a general audience, but there seems to be so little time left before our fate is out of human hands entirely, that I am resigned to the idea that this combination of views will remain rare, and prefer to focus on understanding the beliefs that are shaping the zeitgeist, and in particular the views that animate the people racing towards creation of superintelligence. (I should also take a greater interest in the dispositions of the AIs themselves, the ones that already exist, as they are gaining in power in the world, but I’m still learning how to think about them.)
Where the debate about normativity still matters most, in my opinion, is in the context of alignment. I assume that superintelligences will have their own value systems, but that humans will set the initial conditions (though they may have no idea what they are doing), and so the CEV-like debate about what those values should be, is really important. I have the Wei Dai-like opinion that ideally, humanity would “solve” ethics and metaethics before the creation of superintelligence, and so in that context it’s almost urgent for normative values to be proposed and challenged, so we can glean whatever extra insights we can, in the remaining time that we matter.
There’s a mix of normative and neutrally-factual questions here. The basic normative question is, how should we feel about life? While the factual questions are more like, what are people feeling and why?
Diving straight into the normative: I arrived at the combination of transhumanism and antinatalism long ago, and I still think it’s valid, in fact more valid than ever, since I believe in “short timelines” for superintelligence. I always regarded transhumanism as the more important of the two and something to advocate publicly, whereas antinatalism was more a private matter. This was both a pragmatic choice—campaigning for antinatalism is likely to arouse fierce resistance—and also a matter of priority: I didn’t despair of existence as such, I simply regarded our current human condition as not to be tolerated (let alone imposed upon a new life created by choice); but also as something to which we do not need to be resigned.
At a more abstract level, I also abide by the views of Celia Green, according to which one’s existential feelings should proceed from an assumption of possibility and uncertainty, since that is our actual epistemic situation; but this may require a certain detachment or emotional distance from the concrete particulars of your experience.
There might have been a time when I was more interested in arguing on behalf of these views for a general audience, but there seems to be so little time left before our fate is out of human hands entirely, that I am resigned to the idea that this combination of views will remain rare, and prefer to focus on understanding the beliefs that are shaping the zeitgeist, and in particular the views that animate the people racing towards creation of superintelligence. (I should also take a greater interest in the dispositions of the AIs themselves, the ones that already exist, as they are gaining in power in the world, but I’m still learning how to think about them.)
Where the debate about normativity still matters most, in my opinion, is in the context of alignment. I assume that superintelligences will have their own value systems, but that humans will set the initial conditions (though they may have no idea what they are doing), and so the CEV-like debate about what those values should be, is really important. I have the Wei Dai-like opinion that ideally, humanity would “solve” ethics and metaethics before the creation of superintelligence, and so in that context it’s almost urgent for normative values to be proposed and challenged, so we can glean whatever extra insights we can, in the remaining time that we matter.