Their quality-of-life points combined with long-term-ism reminds me of that simcity build that maximized the population to absurd levels. If you get 'points' for each life, past and future, than maximizing the number of future life is the easiest way to maximize your high score.
> Bostrom calculates that 10E29 potential lives are lost for every second that we fail to colonise the supercluster of galaxies containing the Milky Way.
I think an easy solution would be to normalize the score, as I think the sum of human hapiness would be "better" if there was only ever one human who gave his life a 10/10, than two humans who gave their life a 9/10.
There exists another solution that is "obvious" to "everybody" who has worked in life insurance (or long-term investments in finance): the concept of present value (PV):
Without giving a derivation (which you can find easily on the web), the idea is that a gain of 1 USD that you get in 1 year has to be discounted with a factor of (1+i), where i is the (long-term stable) interest rate. For 3 years, the discount factor is, of course, (1+i)^3, i.e.
- a gain of 1 USD that materializes in 1 year is worth 1/(1+i) USD today
- a gain of 1 USD that materializes in 3 years is worth 1/(1+i)^3 USD today
Thus, including this discount factor for a future monetary flow (as in the PV calculation) makes gains that materialize in, say, 1000 years worth less today than those of the same monetary value that materialize (much) earlier.
Seems like Bostrom isn't thinking big enough. If we could invent time travel and seed life earlier in the universe, figure out a way to slow down entropy and star death and make the current universe last longer, or create new universes wholesale, we can get far bigger total life numbers than that. Alternatively, since what we really care about is QALYs, not lives, making even just one person truly immortal gives us a literal infinity that outweighs the value of all mortal sentient creatures that can ever exist.
This also implies every fictional supervillain who ever tried to achieve immortality was the morally best possible person, no matter what evil they performed in the attempt, even if they failed. Since no probability is ever 0, and any small number multiplied by infinity is still infinity, trying to achieve immortality is the maximally good thing any person can do.
Nick Bostrom wouldn't have missed that, he's a very precise philosopher (I'm reading his book Anthropic Bias, and damn I'm glad I didn't have to tease out that mess by myself).
This quote comes from a particular thought experiment. As I'm sure you'll grant, thought experiments don't discuss what to do if that exact hypothetical were reality, they only discuss what attitude to take towards this whole category of situations. In concrete terms yes, some humongously big number of lives are lost every second, more than 10E29 of them, if time travel is possible or creating new universes is possible, but that doesn't change the conclusion.
And you miss two things as far as I can see: achieving immortality for yourself is not the maximal good, since for one thing it would clearly be even better to achieve immortality for everyone. Second, you're equating infinities. It's hard for humans to reason about infinities, but mathematicians have in fact described that there are infinities of different orders: you can still speak of some "infinite" quantities as being greater than other "infinite" quantities. It's easier if you just drop the word in favour of "zillion" and reason intuitively about that.
Yeah I think if you want to be an actual smartypants you need some kind of exponential discounting. There's a lot of monsters that could eat us along the way, so people that exist right now or are about to exist are WAY more important.
If you wanted to go all in maybe try to consider the number of lives weighted by the probability they exist will. Some kind of drake equation like thing.
> Bostrom calculates that 10E29 potential lives are lost for every second that we fail to colonise the supercluster of galaxies containing the Milky Way.
I think an easy solution would be to normalize the score, as I think the sum of human hapiness would be "better" if there was only ever one human who gave his life a 10/10, than two humans who gave their life a 9/10.