In this post I hope to demonstrate that anyone that is able to create a superinteligent AI has the moral obligation to desing it to be Antinatalist. Failure to do so would substantially increase the probability of human extinction.

To the Garden of Eden

In his book Anthropic Bias, Nick Bostrom argues that the Selfs-Sampling Assumpution (SSA) is true. the SSA states that you should assume you are a random member of your reference class throughout space and time (in our case human beings). For this post we are only interested in the temporal aspect of the anthropic bias. That is to say: Whether we are to order all humans along a line, from Adam and Eve, all the way to the Last Man. where in that line (percent wise) should you expect yourself to be? If we assume the SSA to be true; you should say you have a 1% to be among the first 1%, a 10% to be among the last 10%, a 50% percent chance to be among the middle 50%, etc. This conclusion seems benign, but has some unusual consequences. Such as for example in the fable of Serpent’s Advice:

Eve and Adam, the first two humans, knew that if they gratified their flesh, Eve might bear a child, and that if she did, they would both be expelled from Eden and go on to spawn billions of progeny that would fill the Earth with misery. One day a serpent approached them and spoke thus: “Pssst! If you hold each other, then either Eve will have a child or she won’t. If she has a child, you will have been among the first two out of billions of people. Your conditional probability of having such early positions in the human species given this hypothesis is extremely small. If, on the other hand, Eve does not become pregnant then the conditional probability, given this, of you being among the first two humans is equal to one. By Bayes’s theorem, the risk that she shall bear a child is less than one in a billion. Therefore, my dear friends, indulge your desires and worry not about the consequences!”

To the Labs of Eden

Why am I telling you all of this? Because in reality we are Adam and Eve.

Consider Sydney, future AI researcher. Sydney has developed a superintelligent AI. If its alignment scheme works it will create a future full of joy and happiness, resulting in the long and happy life of a quintillion human beings, making use of Dyson SwarmTechnology. If it does not work, everyone will instantly die. Lucki...

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