No, you’re right — talking about currently-living people is more just the very conservative lower bound, since we don’t have a good way of calculating how many people could exist in the future if existential risks are averted.
If existential risks are averted, you shouldn’t count people, you should count goodness (that won’t necessarily take the form of people or be commensurately influenced by different people). So the number of people (ems) we can fill the future with is also a conservative lower bound for that goodness, which knowably underestimates it.
No, you’re right — talking about currently-living people is more just the very conservative lower bound, since we don’t have a good way of calculating how many people could exist in the future if existential risks are averted.
If existential risks are averted, you shouldn’t count people, you should count goodness (that won’t necessarily take the form of people or be commensurately influenced by different people). So the number of people (ems) we can fill the future with is also a conservative lower bound for that goodness, which knowably underestimates it.
Okay, thanks. Just making sure that I wasn’t completely messing up expected utility calculations.
Not that murdering only 6790 people is okay or anything...