I think democratic human control is extremely unlikely even with a US actor winning the race.
Yeah seriously. Omelas is better than our world in every possible way INCLUDING child abuse and exploitation
Unintended pregnancies don't sound like a benefit to me.
Mark this, anyone who wishes to align AI by training it on human values. What might an intellectually superior AI conclude, is the appropriate way to treat intellectually inferior beings?
If you want a future that isn't hell, reckoning conclusively with this issue, and all issues like it, is an absolute necessity.
dating apps where people could signal their wealth by buying the most expensive virtual good available.
This is a Molochian race to the bottom, similar to a dollar auction. The items have value to people, but only insofar as they have more of them than others. The people overall are therefore not better off for having these items, because the signalling game is zero-sum; there is only so much of the actual reward they are after.
The problem with arguments like this is that they are typically circular. At the end of the day you are using math to try to show why math is necessary for reasoning or whatever.
Best to just take a few unjustified axioms so that you're honest about the uncertainty at the bottom of any worldview
Does the above chart assume all survival situations are better than non-survival? Because that is a DANGEROUS assumption to make.
Maybe hypocrisy in the sense that someone acts like they agree with the social consensus in order to avoid persecution, when in fact they don't and are doing things which don't conform to it. Legalized blackmail would encourage people to not mind their own business and become morality police or witch hunters even about things which don't actually hurt them or anybody else.
Consider the effect legalized blackmail would have had on the gay community before widespread acceptance for a particularly brutal and relatively recent example
Keep in mind also, that humans often seem to just want to hurt each other, despite what they claim, and have more motivations and rationalizations for this than you can even count. Religious dogma, notions of "justice", spitefulness, envy, hatred of any number of different human traits, deterrence, revenge, sadism, curiosity, reinforcement of hierarchy, preservation of traditions, ritual, "suffering adds meaning to life", sexual desire, and more and more that I haven't even mentioned. Sometimes it seems half of human philosophy is just devoted to finding ever more rationalizations to cause suffering, or to avoid caring about the suffering of others.
AI would likely not have all this endless baggage causing it to be cruel. Causing human suffering is not an instrumentally convergent goal. So, most AIs will not have it as a persistent instrumental or terminal goal. Not unless some humans manage to "align" it. Most humans DO have causing or upholding some manner of suffering as a persistent instrumental or terminal goal.
If you're averaging over time as well as space, that isn't an option. All the people you kill will just drag down your average, and the one person who is really happy at the end of it all will barely register in the grand scheme of lives across time. In practice average utilitarianism just reduces to regular old utilitarianism, just with the zero point set at the average utility for a life across a history much vaster than you can affect, instead of set at nonexistence or whatever
Perhaps average utilitarianism would consider a world which only ever had one super happy person in it, as better than our world. But that seems less obviously false to me than the idea we should kill everyone to achieve that, which average utilitarianism wouldn't recommend when properly considered.
I agree that many worlds has little bearing on this question though. Unless it's to claim that you should expect the effective zero point to be different, because for whatever reason you think that our branch is particularly good or particularly bad.