People have very different ideas about when “the future” is, but everyone is really thinking extreme short term on an evolutionary scale. Once upon a time our ancestors were Trilobites (or something just as unlike us). If you could have asked one of those trilobites what they thought of a future in which all trilobites were gone and had evolved into us, I don’t think they would have been happy with that. Our future light cone is not going to be dominated by creatures we would recognise as human. It may be dominated by creatures “evolved” from us or maybe from our uploaded consciousness, or maybe by “inhuman” AI, but it’s not going to be Star Trek or any other Sci-Fi series you have seen. Given that future, the argument for minimising P(doom) at the cost of reducing P(good stuff for me and mine in my lifetime) looks pretty weak. If I am old and have no children, it looks terrible.
Roll the dice.
People have very different ideas about when “the future” is, but everyone is really thinking extreme short term on an evolutionary scale. Once upon a time our ancestors were Trilobites (or something just as unlike us). If you could have asked one of those trilobites what they thought of a future in which all trilobites were gone and had evolved into us, I don’t think they would have been happy with that. Our future light cone is not going to be dominated by creatures we would recognise as human. It may be dominated by creatures “evolved” from us or maybe from our uploaded consciousness, or maybe by “inhuman” AI, but it’s not going to be Star Trek or any other Sci-Fi series you have seen. Given that future, the argument for minimising P(doom) at the cost of reducing P(good stuff for me and mine in my lifetime) looks pretty weak. If I am old and have no children, it looks terrible. Roll the dice.