“Or an even tougher question: On average, across the multiverse, do you think you would advise an intelligent species to stop performing novel physics experiments during the interval after it figures out how to build transistors and before it builds AI?”
Yes I would. What’s tough about this? Just a matter of whether novel physics experiments are more likely to create new existential risks, or mitigate existing ones in a more substantial manner.
Actually, for it to be justified to carry out the experiments, it would also be required that there weren’t alternative recipients for the funding and/or other resources, such that the alternative is more likely to mitigate existential risks.
Let’s not succumb to the technophile instinct of doing all science now, since it’s cool. Most science could well wait for a couple thousand years, if there are more important things to do. We know of good as-yet-undone ways to (1) mitigate currently existing existential risk and (2) increase our intelligence/rationality, so there is no need to go expensively poking around in the dark searching for unexpected benefits, while we haven’t yet reached out to low-hanging benefits we can already see. Let’s not poke around in the dark before we have exhausted the relatively easy ways to increase the brightness of our light sources.
“Or an even tougher question: On average, across the multiverse, do you think you would advise an intelligent species to stop performing novel physics experiments during the interval after it figures out how to build transistors and before it builds AI?”
Yes I would. What’s tough about this? Just a matter of whether novel physics experiments are more likely to create new existential risks, or mitigate existing ones in a more substantial manner.
Actually, for it to be justified to carry out the experiments, it would also be required that there weren’t alternative recipients for the funding and/or other resources, such that the alternative is more likely to mitigate existential risks.
Let’s not succumb to the technophile instinct of doing all science now, since it’s cool. Most science could well wait for a couple thousand years, if there are more important things to do. We know of good as-yet-undone ways to (1) mitigate currently existing existential risk and (2) increase our intelligence/rationality, so there is no need to go expensively poking around in the dark searching for unexpected benefits, while we haven’t yet reached out to low-hanging benefits we can already see. Let’s not poke around in the dark before we have exhausted the relatively easy ways to increase the brightness of our light sources.