“Fruit-picking as an existential risk” by Arepo
Description
TLDR
Longtermists usually focus on lowering p(doom) of total extinction. I argue that
- resource entropy (picking the low hanging fruit) between civilisations is inevitable, and might dramatically reduce p(success) after a catastrophe
- thinking about p(success) requires longtermists to be more explicitly ambitious - not to settle for a civilisation that never leaves Earth
- this ambition ironically makes the case for moving longtermist cause priorities closer to the rest of society's - though perhaps also closer to effective accelerationism
Longtermists think too short term… ly
… about happy futures
The most ambitious form of the longtermist project is a grand vision of a future of human descendants living in some form around billions of stars, or more.[1] The longtermist movement is nominally concerned with maximising the probability of reaching that state, as well as the quality of life in it, but has generally relied on the heuristic of [...]
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Outline:
(00:10 ) TLDR
(00:48 ) Longtermists think too short term... ly
(00:54 ) ... about happy futures
(02:43 ) ... and about the path through less happy futures
(05:17 ) The parable of the apple tree
(06:34 ) A simple equation for p(success)
(09:24 ) Scrumping from future generations
(15:31 ) Counter and counter-counterarguments
(15:36 ) The imminent threat of AGI makes all this irrelevant
(16:54 ) Reclaimed technology makes tech progress easy for future civilisations
(17:59 ) R_annual and N_friction might be too low for this to matter
(18:12 ) Remarks
(20:31 ) Acknowledgements
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First published:
October 19th, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CxMusuX8E5hiTXEWX/fruit-picking-as-an-existential-risk
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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