Crossposted on the EA Forum.

We describe the implications the Existence Neutrality Hypothesis^[1] could have for impartial longtermists, and then provide quantitative impact estimates for four idealized interventions when accounting or not for this hypothesis. Under this hypothesis, there is little value lost if humanity does not create a Space-Faring Civilization. The three main implications are: (1) To reduce significantly the longtermist value of reducing Extinction -Risks, such as those caused by nuclear and bioweapons. (2) To make some new AI Safety agendas (e.g., “Plan B”) competitive with existing AI Safety agendas. (3) To update the relative priorities between existing AI Safety agendas and possibly render some of them significantly less attractive.

Sequence: This post is part 9 of a sequence investigating the longtermist implications of alien Space-Faring Civilizations. Each post aims to be standalone. You can find an introduction to the sequence in the following post.

Summary

The Existence Neutrality Hypothesis (ENH) suggests that humanity not developing a Space-Faring Civilization (SFC) results in minimal marginal value loss, as most cosmic resources would be recovered by other civilizations with comparable utility creation efficiency. Assuming the ENH is about 75% correct (combining the Civ-Saturation Hypothesis^[2] as 84% correct and the Civ-Similarity Hypothesis^[3] as 90% correct), there are three core implications:

Significantly reduce the priority of Extinction-Risk reduction (e.g., nuclear, bioweapon-risks) by about 75%, since fewer cosmic resources and less value would be lost if humanity fails to create a space-faring civilization.
Increase the importance of alternative AI Safety agendas, such as the "Plan B" agenda, which aims at mitigating negative outcomes from misaligned AIs, for example, by reducing the chance that misaligned AIs achieve space colonization.
Shift the main AI safety target from maximizing the joint probability of alignment and humanity creating a space-faring civilization towards optimizing alignment conditional on humanity achieving space colonization. Shifting the focus from reducing Existential-Risks to Alignment-Risks.

We first qualitatively introduce these implications, and then review some questions related to how substantial they are. Finally, we produce a simple quantitative model estimating and illus...

Eric Neyman's Shortform

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Eric Neyman's Shortform

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