I don’t see this defeating my point: as a premise, GD may dominate from the perspective of merely improving lives of existing people as we seem to agree; unless we have a particular bias for long lives specifically of the currently existing humans over in future created humans, ASI may not be a clear reason to save more lives, as it may not only make existing lives longer and nicer, but may actually exactly also reduce the burden for creating any aimed at number of—however long lived—lives; this number of happy future human lives thus hinging less on the preservation on actual lives.
>unless we have a particular bias for long lives specifically of the currently existing humans over in future created humans
Sure, I’m saying I have this bias.
This seems like commons sense morality to me: it would be bad (all else equal) to kill 1000 infants, even if their parents would respond by more children, such that the total population is unchanged.
Anyway, this is a pretty well-trod topic in ethics, and there isn’t much consensus, so the appropriate attitude is moral uncertainty. That is, you should act uncertain between person-affecting ethics (where killing and replacing infants is bad) and impersonal ethics (where killing and replacing infants is neutral).
I don’t see this defeating my point: as a premise, GD may dominate from the perspective of merely improving lives of existing people as we seem to agree; unless we have a particular bias for long lives specifically of the currently existing humans over in future created humans, ASI may not be a clear reason to save more lives, as it may not only make existing lives longer and nicer, but may actually exactly also reduce the burden for creating any aimed at number of—however long lived—lives; this number of happy future human lives thus hinging less on the preservation on actual lives.
>unless we have a particular bias for long lives specifically of the currently existing humans over in future created humans
Sure, I’m saying I have this bias.
This seems like commons sense morality to me: it would be bad (all else equal) to kill 1000 infants, even if their parents would respond by more children, such that the total population is unchanged.
Anyway, this is a pretty well-trod topic in ethics, and there isn’t much consensus, so the appropriate attitude is moral uncertainty. That is, you should act uncertain between person-affecting ethics (where killing and replacing infants is bad) and impersonal ethics (where killing and replacing infants is neutral).