It's easy to justify almost any sort of behavior if you take some risk and assign it a severity of "infinity". A 1% chance of happening? At severity infinity, you're morally obligated to act at even a 0.00001% chance: 0.00001% times infinity is still infinity. That's the AGI logic I'm seeing from these people.
No, that's a strawman. The severity of human extinction is not infinite. For instance, it would be preferable for humanity to go extinct than for every human to be tortured for every minute of their life, and since there is no number larger than infinity, the severity of human extinction must be finite.
This tells me that you haven't seriously engaged with the arguments over AGI. I'm sure there's plenty of nonsense armchair philosophising happening, but you don't take all the "quantum woo" that's out there as some indictment of real quantum mechanics, do you?
You can replace "infinity" with any suitably huge number; I don't need to quibble over tenths, hundredths, and thousandths of a percentile risk that something is going to happen.
You absolutely do have to quibble over those numbers. Or do you not think we should be tracking asteroids either because they only kill 95% of all life once every few hundred million years?
I do not think people should be directing money to asteroid charities, no. It's their money, they can do what they want, but if their discipline demands that they do that, it's a bad discipline.
So to make sure I get this straight, if a plausible calculation suggested that we could see an extinction-level asteroid hurtling towards us in the next hundred years, you don't think that asteroid detection is worth funding via any means, like charities or governments?
I'm pretty happy with what it says about my critique, too. For instance, my side of this "debate", such as it is, will never spend $100,000 funding a tabletop role playing game aiming to educate people on the dangers of asteroids.
> I'm pretty happy with what it says about my critique, too. For instance, my side of this "debate", such as it is, will never spend $100,000 funding a tabletop role playing game aiming to educate people on the dangers of asteroids.
I'm not sure how you can be so confident that raising awareness wouldn't have beneficial downstream effects. I'm skeptical too, but outright dismissal doesn't seem warranted. Then again, you are downright dismissive about the very real and scientifically proven dangers of asteroids wiping out most of life on Earth, so I suppose this is pretty mild by comparison.
