The meat of this paper is applying the "person-affecting stance" to the question of timing. There's a lot of philosophy background in that phrase, but the paper describes the key distinction well on page 4:
> In particular, we may distinguish between a person-affecting perspective, which focuses on the interests of existing people, and an impersonal perspective, which extends consideration to all possible future generations that may or may not come into existence depending on our choices.
In philosophy, it's always fine to see where ideas lead. For the rest of us, though, we might take pause here because the "person-affecting" perspective is insane in this context. It gives full moral weight to whether you make things better or worse for people who happen to be alive right now -- but no moral weight at all to whether you leave a world that's better or worse for people who will be born any time after right now. Wanna destroy the biosphere or economy in a way that only really catches up to tomorrow's kids? Totally fine from the "person-affecting perspective", because in some technical sense, no individual was made worse off than they were before. They were born into the mess, so it's not a problem.
On the contrary, nearly every machine we've created is capable of things that we are not capable of ourselves. Cars travel more than twice as fast as the swiftest human. Airplanes fly. Calculators do math in an instant that would take a human months. Lightbulbs emit light. Cranes lift many tons. And so on and so forth.
So to create something that exceeds our capabilities is not a matter of hubris (as if physical laws cared about hubris anyway), it's an unambiguously ordinary occurrence.
You likely already know, but the "Pluribus" poker bot was beating humans back in 2019. Games of chance will be around if people are around, but you'll have to be careful to ensure you're playing against people, unassisted people.
So much of these degenerate online gambling / "investment" platforms are illegal here for good reason. If you are just a normal person playing fairly, you are being scammed. Same for things like Polymarket, the only winners are the people with insider knowledge.
Even manual labor is uncertain. Nothing in principle prevents a robot from being a mass produceable, relatively cheap, 24/7 manual worker.
We've presumably all seen the progress of humanoid robotics; they're currently far from emulating human manual dexterity, but in the last few years they've gotten pretty skilled at rapid locomotion. And robots will likely end up with a different skill profile at manual tasks than humans, simply due to being made of different materials via a more modular process. It could be a similar story to the rise of the practical skills of chatbots.
In theory we could produce a utopia for humans, automating all the bad labor. But I have little optimism left in my bones.
> In particular, we may distinguish between a person-affecting perspective, which focuses on the interests of existing people, and an impersonal perspective, which extends consideration to all possible future generations that may or may not come into existence depending on our choices.
In philosophy, it's always fine to see where ideas lead. For the rest of us, though, we might take pause here because the "person-affecting" perspective is insane in this context. It gives full moral weight to whether you make things better or worse for people who happen to be alive right now -- but no moral weight at all to whether you leave a world that's better or worse for people who will be born any time after right now. Wanna destroy the biosphere or economy in a way that only really catches up to tomorrow's kids? Totally fine from the "person-affecting perspective", because in some technical sense, no individual was made worse off than they were before. They were born into the mess, so it's not a problem.
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