Elias Schmied

Crossposted from Substack and the EA Forum. A common argument for optimism about the future is that living conditions have improved a lot in the past few hundred years, billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and so on. It’s a very strong, grounding piece of evidence - probably the best we have in figuring out what our foundational beliefs about the world should be. However, I now think it’s a lot less powerful than I once did. Let’s take a Darwinian perspective - entities that are better at reproducing, spreading and power-seeking will become more common and eventually dominate the world.[1] This is an almost tautological story that plausibly applies to everything ever, agnostic to the specifics. It first happened with biological life in the last few billion years and humans specifically in the last hundred thousand years. Eventually, it led to accelerating economic growth in the last few thousand years, and in the future it will presumably lead to the colonization of the universe. My core point is this: It makes complete sense that this nihilistic optimization process at first actually benefits some class of agent - because initially, the easiest way to keep growing is to use some class of agent in the world and incentivize it by satisfying its preferences. But then, as the optimization becomes more and more advanced, it stops being beneficial - because there are almost certainly some more evolutionarily fit configurations out there than the class of agent that the process just happened to start out with. It’s a “Darwinian honeymoon”.[2] That’s very abstract - I’ll give an example. The population of the red junglefowl, the wild ancestor of the chicken, was in maybe the tens of millions, concentrated in the Southeast Asian jungle.[3] Then, around seven thousand years ago, humans started to domesticate them into Gallus Gallus domesticus, the modern chicken, and chicken farming spread through Persia and the Middle East into Europe. By 1700,