Comment by luke-stanley
2 months ago
Do you mean has anyone looked into making suffering models like people do weather models for regional / global maps to predict likely suffering and remediation? Or are you just pointing to touchy EA issues?
2 months ago
Do you mean has anyone looked into making suffering models like people do weather models for regional / global maps to predict likely suffering and remediation? Or are you just pointing to touchy EA issues?
Just joking about EA, who did exactly what you are suggesting, then it went promptly off the rails. But maybe they’ve regrouped since FTX, I don’t know.
I'm thinking more like weather prediction with big ensemble models for human suffering prediction, you know, time series prediction, which need not be a monolithic ethical imperative with loads of subprojects and not so uniform initiatives. I guess Deepmind's SOTA weather transformers could indeed be a good starting point. I did find that an animal welfare org speculated about doing similar actually!
The EA people started with similar ideas but eventually determined that minimizing current human suffering was not nearly optimal for minimizing total human suffering. Once they turned their focus to future human suffering, everything quickly coalesced around climate change as the biggest threat, and there was no need for a fancy dynamic model.