Those concerned for posterity should respond with a unified voice: we choose growth.

An interesting thought experiment from Securing posterity by Leopold Aschenbrenner.  

He is asking:

New technologies can be dangerous, threatening the very survival of humanity. Is economic growth inherently risky, and how do we maximize the chances of a flourishing future?

His discussion veers across multiple scenarios and concludes with:

In that sense, making people richer—whether through growth or other means—can accomplish similar goals as trying to persuade people to adopt different values. For example, some in the “Effective Altruism” community have pursued an intellectual project called “longtermism” to get people to care more about the very long run—in effect, to get them to lower their discount rate. In terms of getting people to care more about preventing existential risk, I calculate that doubling people’s consumption might have a similar effect as, say, lowering people’s discount rate from 2% to 1.4%. Perhaps, if we followed this argument to the end, we might reach the counterintuitive conclusion that the most effective thing we can do reduce the risk of an existential catastrophe is not to invest in safety directly or to try to persuade people to be more long-term oriented—but rather to spend money on alleviating poverty, so more people are well-off enough to care about safety.

The model also suggests a potential downside to some of the well-meaning efforts that aim to directly increase people’s concern about catastrophes. An impatient society might in fact favor slower growth for the sake of safety. Recall how faster growth initially increased risk in the short term, and how it took several hundred years before we saw an overall reduction in risk. If people are mostly concerned about more immediate risks to themselves, they might deliberately decide to slow growth, reducing the risk for their current generation at the cost of greater risk for future generations.

Of course, that is not what those concerned about existential catastrophes are advocating. But we should worry about the culture they would further if their ideas about the risks of technological progress continue to become more mainstream. We may end up with ever-more safety bureaucracy and ever-more risk aversion, not contributing much to decreasing existential risk directly but hindering innovation and slowing growth—ultimately reducing the chances of humanity’s survival.

Arguably, that’s exactly what we have been doing in the United States. In the spirit of “an abundance of caution,” we’ve been overzealously applying the precautionary principle. This has already meant we are less able to deal with catastrophes. The regulatory bureaucracy at the FDA meant the U.S. was unable to detect the coronavirus hitting our shores in February and is delaying the development of effective therapeutics and vaccines. Proponents claim the precautionary principle puts safety first, but, in the long run, it may actually make us less safe.

To the extent that we are at a crossroads between continued growth with—potentially risky—innovation on the one hand, and stagnant decadence in the name of comfort and safety on the other hand, those concerned for posterity should respond with a unified voice: we choose growth. 

Brava!