This is the first of two papers from Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute that we will link to today.
After watching these folks for over a decade I'm still not sure if the founder of the group, Nick Bostrom, is a charlatan or a visionary. I do know he is very sharp. Early on, the FHI was very gloomy, "the end is nigh"; "we're all gonna die" stuff, but I think he realized that once you've said that a few times there isn't really any reason for the Institute to remain so they've broadened and nuanced the message. Et voilà, seventeen years after founding they are still thinking about stuff and writing:
WHAT IS THE UPPER LIMIT OF VALUE?
January 27, 2021
ABSTRACT
How much value can our decisions create? We argue that unless our current understanding of physics is wrong in fairly fundamental ways, there exists an upper limit of value relevant to our decisions. First, due to the speed of light and the definition and conception of economic growth, the limit to economic growth is a restrictive one. Additionally, a related far larger but still finite limit exists for value in a much broader sense due to the physics of information and the ability of physical beings to place value on outcomes. We discuss how this argument can handle lexicographic preferences, probabilities, and the implications for infinite ethics and ethical uncertainty.
1 Introduction
The future of humanity contains seemingly limitless possibility, with implications for the value of our choices in the short term. Ethics discusses those choices, and for consequentialists in particular, infinities have worrying ethical implications. Bostrom [ 1] and others have asked questions, for example, about how aggregative consequentialist theories can deal with infinities. Others have expanded the questions still further, including measure problems in cosmology, and related issues in infinite computable or even noncomputable universes in a multiverse.
In this paper, we will argue that "limitless" and "infinite" when used to describe value or the moral importance of our decisions can only be hyperbolic, rather than exact descriptions. Our physical universe is bounded, both physically1 and in terms of possibility. Furthermore, this finite limit is true both in the near term, and in the indefinite future. To discuss this, we restrict ourselves to a relatively prosaic setting, and for at least this paper, we restrict our interests to a single universe that obeys the laws of physics as currently (partially) understood....*****
2 Economic Growth and Physical Limits
Economic theory, the study of human choices about allocation of scarce resources3, is useful for describing a large portion of what humans do. This is in large part because it is a positive description, rather than a normative one, and is local in scope. For example, it does not claim that preferences must be a certain way. Instead, economic theory simply notes that humans’ values seem to be a certain way. Given some reasonable local assumptions, this can be used to make falsifiable predictions about behavior. Such a theory is by no means universally correct, as noted below, but forms a more useful predictive theory than most alternatives.Clearly, the arguments and assumptions do not need to extend indefinitely to be useful. For example, economic assumptions such as non-satiation (which Mas-Collel [ 6] and others more carefully refer to as local non-satiation) will obviously fall apart at some point. That is, if blueberries are good, more blueberries are better, but at some point the volume of blueberries in question leads to absurdities [7] and disvalue. Here, we suggest that there are fundamental reasons to question the application of simple economic thinking about value and growth in value to long-term decisions. This is important independent of the broader argument about non-infinite value, and also both informs and motivates that argument....
....MUCH MORE (24 page PDF)
On that note, I am going to order up some blueberries. Back in a bit.