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Tobias Baumann on Space Colonization and Cooperative Artificial Intelligence
171 Plays1 year ago
Tobias Baumann joins the podcast to discuss suffering risks, space colonization, and cooperative artificial intelligence. You can read more about Tobias' work here: https://centerforreducingsuffering.org.
Timestamps:
00:00 Suffering risks
02:50 Space colonization
10:12 Moral circle expansion
19:14 Cooperative artificial intelligence
36:19 Influencing governments
39:34 Can we reduce suffering?
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:00
Speaker
Tobias, welcome to the Future of Life Institute podcast. Glad to have you on. Perhaps you could start by introducing yourself to our listeners. Yeah, thanks for having me. So my name is Tobias Berman. I'm a researcher at and co-founder of the Center for Reducing Suffering, which is a research nonprofit
00:00:22
Speaker
that tries to figure out what you can do now to best reduce suffering, taking into account all sentient beings and the long-term future. I'm also the author of a book called Avoiding the Worst, which is exploring potential worst-case futures of humanity and what we can do to prevent them.
Understanding Suffering Risks
00:00:42
Speaker
All right, so what are these suffering risks that you're worried about and why should we focus on them?
00:00:49
Speaker
So suffering risks are broadly defined as worst case futures that entail suffering on an astronomical scale, vastly exceeding everything that has happened so far. And I mean, why should we focus on them? Well, because that would be very bad, right? So it's kind of self-explanatory that those scenarios would be extremely bad, which is why it would be worthwhile to do something to prevent that, if we can.
Space Colonization and Its Implications
00:01:18
Speaker
One of these scenarios that could cause a lot of suffering involves space colonization. Maybe we could start there and you could talk about how space colonization could be risky and could potentially create a lot of suffering. Yeah. I suppose the relevant bit is simply that it would massively raise the stakes that
00:01:40
Speaker
It would presumably result in an overall explosion of the size of human civilization, of the overall population size. If humanity expands throughout the universe, then everything is kind of scaled up by a factor of not just 10 or 100, but by a factor of a million or a billion, if you imagine.
00:02:01
Speaker
a future interstellar intergalactic civilization. So the stakes would be higher by many orders of magnitude. So even if only the existing forms of suffering continue, they now happen on a larger scale, so that would already be
00:02:18
Speaker
an asterisk. Although it is worth noting that the relationship between expansion into space and astronomical scales is not so straightforward. Because if you have a situation where we really, I don't know, build sporadic outposts somewhere or mine some sort of asteroids or something like that, then that in and of itself would not be so relevant. So I mean, the key question is that it would raise the stakes, that it would result in an explosion of the size of
00:02:47
Speaker
of human population, of human civilization.
Motivations Behind Space Colonization
00:02:50
Speaker
Do you think all of the worst possible suffering events in the future involve space colonization? Or do you think that space colonization is the biggest suffering risk because it raises the stakes so much?
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this sort of ties back to the expected value framework, right? An argument can be made that scenarios that involve space colonization are just so much larger in scale than many orders of magnitude that we should focus on them, even if those scenarios are not necessarily the most likely. I'm not saying that space colonization is necessarily likely. I mean, the sort of large-scale space colonization. In fact, maybe unfairly
00:03:32
Speaker
I'm fairly skeptical about that because what exactly would even be the motivation? Why exactly does Elon Musk need to go to Mars? It's just a barren wasteland with weird gravity and no atmosphere. Why exactly? What exactly is the point of expanding into space? We're far away from running out of available space on Earth. One can wonder why exactly space colonization would happen.
00:04:01
Speaker
But I mean, that is an intention with like the argument, like the EV framework and the larger stakes if space colonization happens.
00:04:10
Speaker
Do you think that humanity in the future wouldn't necessarily be motivated to venture into space, to expand into space? At least it's not so obvious to me. I mean, it's subject to the usual great uncertainty about the future. I would say that I'm neither super confident that space condensation will happen nor super confident that it will not happen.
00:04:34
Speaker
But I was just saying that I'm wondering about what exactly would the motivation be, other than that it's kind of cool to expand into space. Perhaps one big large motivation is just that it would be an awesome testament to what humanity is able to achieve. But if we're talking more in terms of
00:04:56
Speaker
more the objective value of trying to conquer other planets, for example, or trying to extract resources.
The Feasibility of Space Colonization
00:05:04
Speaker
Then perhaps one thing would be that if we had control over
00:05:08
Speaker
things that are large-scale risks on Earth, such as nuclear weapons and engineered pandemics and perhaps artificial intelligence, then if we're only sitting on Earth, then we're just waiting to be destroyed by an asteroid or a supervolcano or another type of natural risk if we haven't expanded into space. So perhaps that could be a motivation to go to space that's beyond the
00:05:35
Speaker
accelerating feeling of seeing a rocket fly and humans on the moon and on Mars and so on? Possibly. I mean, okay, there's still a question for that, whether it is worth the costs, whether or not
00:05:49
Speaker
I mean, you can also just have a bunker in Antarctica somewhere. Even if you have nuclear war, Earth is still less inhospitable than Mars, probably, because Mars doesn't have an atmosphere. So, I mean, yeah, I don't know. But perhaps that could be a reason to do it. But that is just the reason to have an outpost somewhere, right? Not a reason to colonize every planet. So there's one point.
00:06:15
Speaker
Of course, there's a difference between whether you believe it's a good idea that humans should attempt space colonization and whether you predict that humans actually will attempt space colonization. As I understand, you think that we will actually attempt to colonize space and that this could constitute just raising the stakes enormously, which also includes raising the stakes of a lot of future suffering. Is that somewhat correct?
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm just saying it is impossible.