Global Priorities Institute (Oxford University)

You can now read Andreas Mogensen's working paper, Desire-Fulfilment and Consciousness, here: https://lnkd.in/euvdNwv3 Abstract: I show that there are good reasons to think that some individuals without any capacity for consciousness should be counted as welfare subjects, assuming that desire-fulfilment is a welfare good and that any individuals who can accrue welfare goods are welfare subjects. While other philosophers have argued for similar conclusions, I show that they have done so by relying on a simplistic understanding of the desire-fulfilment theory. My argument is intended to be sensitive to the complexities and nuances of contemporary developments of the theory, while avoiding highly counter-intuitive implications of previous arguments for the same conclusion.

Tomi Francis' newest working paper, Aggregating Small Risks of Serious Harms, is now available to read here: https://lnkd.in/e2vp_NvC Abstract: According to Partial Aggregation, a serious harm can be outweighed by a large number of somewhat less serious harms, but can outweigh any number of trivial harms. In this paper, I address the question of how we should extend Partial Aggregation to cases of risk, and especially to cases involving small risks of serious harms. I argue that, contrary to the most popular versions of the ex ante and ex post views, we should sometimes prevent a small risk that a large number of people will suffer serious harms rather than prevent a small number of people from certainly suffering the same harms. Along the way, I object to the ex ante view on the grounds that it gives an implausible degree of priority to preventing identified over statistical harms, and to the ex post view on the grounds that it fails to respect the separateness of persons. An insight about the nature of claims emerges from these arguments: there are three conceptually distinct senses in which a person’s claim can be said to have a certain degree of strength. I make use of the distinction between these three senses in which a claim can be said to have strength in order to set out a new, more plausible, view about the aggregation of people’s claims under risk.

Congratulations to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson for winning the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics! Earlier this year, Oxford University's Economics Department and GPI hosted Prof Acemoglu for the 2024 Atkinson Memorial Lecture. You can watch his talk here: https://lnkd.in/e4bggjyq

Philip Trammell's newest working paper, Ethical Consumerism, is now available to read here: https://lnkd.in/ebrZTy_9 Abstract: I study a static production economy in which consumers have not only preferences over their own consumption but also external, or “ethical”, preferences over the supply of each good. Though existing work on the implications of external preferences assumes price-taking, I show that ethical consumers generically prefer not to act even approximately as price-takers. I therefore introduce a near-Nash equilibrium concept that generalizes the near-Nash equilibria found in literature on strategic foundations of general equilibrium to accommodate ethical preferences. I find (narrow) sufficient criteria under which such equilibria exist, and characterize consumer behavior in all such equilibria. Finally I find that ethical preferences can have arbitrary impacts on consumer behavior in equilibrium, including motivating a consumer (1) to decrease her consumption of all goods which she would prefer in greater supply and vice-versa, or (2) not to exhaust her budget, even if her utility increases both in her consumption and in the supply of all goods.

GPI philosophers Elliott Thornley and Bradford Saad are project leads for the Future Impact Group (FIG) research fellowship, working on corrigibility, digital sentience, suffering risks, and ideological fanaticism. The fellowship is now accepting applications. Learn more about the projects and apply here: https://lnkd.in/eKYSpe4E (EOD 28 Sept)

The newest working paper by Teruji Thomas, Dispelling the Anthropic Shadow, is now available to read here: https://lnkd.in/eGY3PNGQ Abstract: There are some possible events that we could not possibly discover in our past. We could not discover an omnicidal catastrophe, an event so destructive that it permanently wiped out life on Earth. Had such a catastrophe occurred, we wouldn’t be here to find out. This space of unobservable histories has been called the anthropic shadow. Several authors claim that the anthropic shadow leads to an ‘observation selection bias’, analogous to survivorship bias, when we use the historical record to estimate catastrophic risks. I argue against this claim.

You can now watch @Tomi Francis' talk, Aggregating Small Risks of Serious Harms, given at the 14th Oxford Workshop on Global Priorities Research, here: https://lnkd.in/ejCXFvaP

Elliott Thornley's talk, A Non-Identity Dilemma for Person-Affecting Views, given at the St Andrews-GPI Joint Workshop on the Long-Term Future is now available to watch here: https://lnkd.in/ee7WmrGG

AI alignment vs AI ethical treatment: Ten challenges, by Adam Bradley and Bradford Saad, has been added to our Working Paper Series: https://lnkd.in/eVCuQCfW Abstract: A morally acceptable course of AI development should avoid two dangers: creating unaligned AI systems that pose a threat to humanity and mistreating AI systems that merit moral consideration in their own right. This paper argues these two dangers interact and that if we create AI systems that merit moral consideration, simultaneously avoiding both of these dangers would be extremely challenging. While our argument is straightforward and supported by a wide range of pretheoretical moral judgments, it has far-reaching moral implications for AI development. Although the most obvious way to avoid the tension between alignment and ethical treatment would be to avoid creating AI systems that merit moral consideration, this option may be unrealistic and is perhaps fleeting. So, we conclude by offering some suggestions for other ways of mitigating mistreatment risks associated with alignment.

In search of a biological crux for AI consciousness, the newest working paper by Bradford Saad, is now available to read here: https://lnkd.in/eggAkJN5 Abstract: Whether AI systems could be conscious is often thought to turn on whether consciousness is closely linked to biology. The rough thought is that if consciousness is closely linked to biology, then AI consciousness is impossible, and if consciousness is not closely linked to biology, then AI consciousness is possible—or, at any rate, it’s more likely to be possible. A clearer specification of the kind of link between consciousness and biology that is crucial for the possibility of AI consciousness would help organize inquiry into the topic. However, I argue, proposed views about the relationship between consciousness and biology tend not to capture a link that is crucial for the possibility of AI consciousness. In addition, I offer a crucial thesis, namely the biological requirement according to which being consciousness at least nomically requires having biological states.