The Nonlinear Library EA - On the Value of Advancing Progress by Toby Ord
Jul 11, 2024
18:45
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On the Value of Advancing Progress, published by Toby Ord on July 11, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
(PDF available)
I show how a standard argument for advancing progress is extremely sensitive to how humanity's story eventually ends. Whether advancing progress is ultimately good or bad depends crucially on whether it also advances the end of humanity. Because we know so little about the answer to this crucial question, the case for advancing progress is undermined.
I suggest we must either overcome this objection through improving our understanding of these connections between progress and human extinction or switch our focus to advancing certain kinds of progress relative to others - changing where we are going, rather than just how soon we get there.[1]
Things are getting better. While there are substantial ups and downs, long-term progress in science, technology, and values have tended to make people's lives longer, freer, and more prosperous. We could represent this as a graph of quality of life over time, giving a curve that generally trends upwards.
What would happen if we were to advance all kinds of progress by a year? Imagine a burst of faster progress, where after a short period, all forms of progress end up a year ahead of where they would have been. We might think of the future trajectory of quality of life as being primarily driven by science, technology, the economy, population, culture, societal norms, moral norms, and so forth.
We're considering what would happen if we could move all of these features a year ahead of where they would have been.
While the burst of faster progress may be temporary, we should expect its effect of getting a year ahead to endure.[2] If we'd only advanced some domains of progress, we might expect further progress in those areas to be held back by the domains that didn't advance - but here we're imagining moving the entire internal clock of civilisation forward a year.
If we were to advance progress in this way, we'd be shifting the curve of quality of life a year to the left. Since the curve is generally increasing, this would mean the new trajectory of our future is generally higher than the old one. So the value of advancing progress isn't just a matter of impatience - wanting to get to the good bits sooner - but of overall improvement in people's quality of life across the future.
Figure 1. Sooner is better. The solid green curve is the default trajectory of quality of life over time, while the dashed curve is the trajectory if progress were uniformly advanced by one year (shifting the default curve to the left). Because the trajectories trend upwards, quality of life is generally higher under the advanced curve. To help see this, I've shaded the improvements to quality of life green and the worsenings red.
That's a standard story within economics: progress in science, technology, and values has been making the world a better place, so a burst of faster progress that brought this all forward by a year would provide a lasting benefit for humanity.
But this story is missing a crucial piece.
The trajectory of humanity's future is not literally infinite. One day it will come to an end. This might be a global civilisation dying of old age, lumbering under the weight of accumulated bureaucracy or decadence. It might be a civilisation running out of resources: either using them up prematurely or enduring until the sun itself burns out. It might be a civilisation that ends in sudden catastrophe - a natural calamity or one of its own making.
If the trajectory must come to an end, what happens to the previous story of an advancement in progress being a permanent uplifting of the quality of life? The answer depends on the nature of the end time. There are two very natural possibilities.
One is that the end time is fixed. It...
(PDF available)
I show how a standard argument for advancing progress is extremely sensitive to how humanity's story eventually ends. Whether advancing progress is ultimately good or bad depends crucially on whether it also advances the end of humanity. Because we know so little about the answer to this crucial question, the case for advancing progress is undermined.
I suggest we must either overcome this objection through improving our understanding of these connections between progress and human extinction or switch our focus to advancing certain kinds of progress relative to others - changing where we are going, rather than just how soon we get there.[1]
Things are getting better. While there are substantial ups and downs, long-term progress in science, technology, and values have tended to make people's lives longer, freer, and more prosperous. We could represent this as a graph of quality of life over time, giving a curve that generally trends upwards.
What would happen if we were to advance all kinds of progress by a year? Imagine a burst of faster progress, where after a short period, all forms of progress end up a year ahead of where they would have been. We might think of the future trajectory of quality of life as being primarily driven by science, technology, the economy, population, culture, societal norms, moral norms, and so forth.
We're considering what would happen if we could move all of these features a year ahead of where they would have been.
While the burst of faster progress may be temporary, we should expect its effect of getting a year ahead to endure.[2] If we'd only advanced some domains of progress, we might expect further progress in those areas to be held back by the domains that didn't advance - but here we're imagining moving the entire internal clock of civilisation forward a year.
If we were to advance progress in this way, we'd be shifting the curve of quality of life a year to the left. Since the curve is generally increasing, this would mean the new trajectory of our future is generally higher than the old one. So the value of advancing progress isn't just a matter of impatience - wanting to get to the good bits sooner - but of overall improvement in people's quality of life across the future.
Figure 1. Sooner is better. The solid green curve is the default trajectory of quality of life over time, while the dashed curve is the trajectory if progress were uniformly advanced by one year (shifting the default curve to the left). Because the trajectories trend upwards, quality of life is generally higher under the advanced curve. To help see this, I've shaded the improvements to quality of life green and the worsenings red.
That's a standard story within economics: progress in science, technology, and values has been making the world a better place, so a burst of faster progress that brought this all forward by a year would provide a lasting benefit for humanity.
But this story is missing a crucial piece.
The trajectory of humanity's future is not literally infinite. One day it will come to an end. This might be a global civilisation dying of old age, lumbering under the weight of accumulated bureaucracy or decadence. It might be a civilisation running out of resources: either using them up prematurely or enduring until the sun itself burns out. It might be a civilisation that ends in sudden catastrophe - a natural calamity or one of its own making.
If the trajectory must come to an end, what happens to the previous story of an advancement in progress being a permanent uplifting of the quality of life? The answer depends on the nature of the end time. There are two very natural possibilities.
One is that the end time is fixed. It...