When I say the extreme “0.0001%” and “all” I’m mostly thinking about how I think near-optimal futures are nontrivially likely, how “AI going well” is what could enable those futures, and how near-optimal futures are not only somewhat better than the world today, but literally “extremely good” / much, much better.
That is, in these extremely good futures, I see us surviving to what Bostrom calls “technological maturity,” and I also see the population of humans and/or conscious minds we care about ballooning to astronomically large numbers as we engage in space colonization and put to use of much of the matter in the reachable universe (~400 billion stars in our galaxy, ~2 trillion galaxies in the reachable universe). The vast number of beings in these futures means that ensuring that 99.9999+% of them have better lives than all of us in 2026 is just a matter of being intentional about making sure that the minds we create in other galaxies are actually ~all awesome. I think technologically we’d easily have the capability and it’d just be a question of are we actually universally optimizing/trying for that or not. (In Letter from Utopia, I think Bostrom does a good job conveying that humans today have lives nowhere close to the best possible lives or experiences permitted by physics.) And again, in futures where AI goes well, I think there’s a significant chance (and it definitely “could” happen, to use the word you used when saying 10%/90%) that we would manage to actually optimize for such a near-optimal, extremely good future.
When I say the extreme “0.0001%” and “all” I’m mostly thinking about how I think near-optimal futures are nontrivially likely, how “AI going well” is what could enable those futures, and how near-optimal futures are not only somewhat better than the world today, but literally “extremely good” / much, much better.
That is, in these extremely good futures, I see us surviving to what Bostrom calls “technological maturity,” and I also see the population of humans and/or conscious minds we care about ballooning to astronomically large numbers as we engage in space colonization and put to use of much of the matter in the reachable universe (~400 billion stars in our galaxy, ~2 trillion galaxies in the reachable universe). The vast number of beings in these futures means that ensuring that 99.9999+% of them have better lives than all of us in 2026 is just a matter of being intentional about making sure that the minds we create in other galaxies are actually ~all awesome. I think technologically we’d easily have the capability and it’d just be a question of are we actually universally optimizing/trying for that or not. (In Letter from Utopia, I think Bostrom does a good job conveying that humans today have lives nowhere close to the best possible lives or experiences permitted by physics.) And again, in futures where AI goes well, I think there’s a significant chance (and it definitely “could” happen, to use the word you used when saying 10%/90%) that we would manage to actually optimize for such a near-optimal, extremely good future.