Thanks for your reply, lots of interesting points :)

Consciousness may not be binary, in that case, we don't know if humans are low, medium, or high consciousness, I only know that I am not at zero. We should then likely assume we are average. Then, the relevant comparison is no longer between P(humanity is "conscious") and P(aliens creating SFCs are "conscious") but between P(humanity's consciousness > 0) and P(aliens-creating-SFC's consciousness > 0)

I particularly appreciate that reframing of consciousness. I think it's probably both binary and continuous though. Binary in the sense that you need a "machinery" that's capable of producing consciousness i.e. neurons in a brain seem to work. And then if you have that capable machinery, you then have the range from low to high consciousness, like we see on Earth. If intelligence is related to consciousness level as it seems to be on Earth, then I would expect that any alien with "capable machinery" that's intelligent enough to become spacefaring would have consciousness high enough to satisfy my worries (though not necessarily at the top of the range). 

So then any alien civilisation would either be "conscious enough" or "not conscious at all", conditional on (a) the machinery of life being binary in its ability to produce a scale of consciousness and (b) consciousness being correlated with intelligence.

So I'm not betting on it. The stakes are so high (a universe devoid of sentience) that I would have to meet and test the consciousness of aliens with a 'perfect' theory of consciousness before I updated any strategy towards reducing P(ancestral-human SFC) even if there's an extremely high probability of Civ-Similarity Hypothesis being true.

Thanks David, that makes sense :)

The validity of this hypothesis can be studied using models estimating the frequency of Space-Faring Civilizations (SFCs) in the universe (Sandberg 2018, Finnveden 2019, Olson 2020, Hanson 2021, Snyder-Beattie 2021, Cook 2022). The validity will also depend on which decision theory we use and on our beliefs behind these

I'm very speculative about making moral decisions concerning the donations of potentially millions of dollars based on something so speculative. I think it's too far down the EA crazy train to prioritise different causes based on the density of alien civilisations. It's probably more speculative than the simulation hypothesis (which, if true, significantly increases the likelihood that you are the only sentient being in this universe), but we don't make moral decisions based on that. 

I get that there's been a lot of work on this and that we can make progress on it (I know, I'm an astrobiologist), but I'm sure there are so many unknown unknowns associated with the origin of life, development of sentience, and spacefaring civilisation that we just aren't there yet. The universe is so enormous and bonkers and our brains are so small - we can make numerical estimates sure, but creating a number doesn't necessarily mean we have more certainty.

How much counterfactual value Humanity creates then depends entirely on the utility Humanity’s spacefaring civilisation creates relative to all spacefaring civilisations. 

I've got a big moral circle (all sentient beings and their descendants), but it does not extend to aliens because of cluelessness. 

I think you're posing a post-understanding of consciousness question. Consciousness might be very special or it might be an emergent property of anything that synthesises information, we just don't know. But it's possible to imagine aliens with complex behaviour similar to us, but without evolving the consciousness aspect, like superintelligent AI probably will be like. For now, the safe assumption is that we're the only conscious life, and I think it's very important that we act like it until proven otherwise. 

So for now, I'm quite confident that if we're thinking about the moral utility of spacefaring civilisation, we should at least limit our scope to our own civilisation, more specifically, our own sentience and its descendants (I personally prefer to limit that scope even further to the next few thousand years, or just our Solar System to reduce the ambiguity a bit - longtermism still stands strong with this huge limitation). I think the main value in looking into the potential density of aliens in the universe helps figure out what our own future might look like. Even if humans only colonise the Solar System because alien SFCs colonise the galaxy, that's still 10^27 potential future lives (1.2 sextillion over the next 6000 years; future life equivalents based on the Solar System's carrying capacity; as opposed to 100 trillion if we stay on Earth till its destruction). We can control and predict that to an extent, and there's enough ambiguity and cluelessness already associated with how to make human civilisation's future in space good in the context of AI - but we can at least make some concrete decisions (e.g. work by Simon Institute & CLR).

Very interesting post though! Lots to think about and I can see that this could be the most important moral consideration... maybe... I look forward to your series and I definitely think it's worthwhile to try and figure out what that consideration might be. 

Other currently neglected agendas may increase P(Alignment | Humanity creates an SFC) while not increasing P(Alignment AND Humanity creates an SFC). Those include agendas aiming at decreasing P(Humanity creates an SFC | Misalignment). An example of intervention in such an agenda is overriding instrumental goals for space colonization and replacing them with an active desire not to colonize space. This defensive preference could be removed later, conditional on achieving corrigibility.

What's the difference between "P(Alignment | Humanity creates an SFC)" and "P(Alignment AND Humanity creates an SFC)"? 

I don't get it either. Can you maybe run us through 2 worked examples for bullet point 2? Like what is someone currently doing (or planning to do) that you think should be deprioritised? And presumably, there might be something that you think should be prioritised instead? 

I'm imagining here that you want to deprioritise an AI safety regime if it is focusing on making AIs that create technology that can be used for spacefaring civilisation, but aren't aligned? That wouldn't be an AI safety regime would it? That's just creating AI that wants to leave Earth

I accept that I don't know actual procedure for firing a nuclear weapon. And no one in the west knows what North Korea's nuclear weapons cybersecurity is like, and ChatGPT tells me its connected to digital networks. So there's definitely some uncertainty and I wouldn't dismiss the possibility outright that nuclear weapons would be more likely to be hacked if superintelligence existed. So I'd guess maybe a 10-20% chance that it's possible to hack nuclear weapons based on what I know.

And I agree that it may be impossible to create drexlerian style nanotech. Maybe a 0.5% chance an ASI could do something like that? 

But I don't think the debate here is about any particular scenario that I came up with. 

I think if I tried really hard I could come up with about 20 scenarios where an artificial superintelligence might be able to destroy humanity (if you really want me to I can try and list them). And I guess my proposed scenarios would have an average chance of actually working of 1-2%, so maybe around 10% chance that one of my proposed scenarios would work. 

But are you saying that the chance of ASI being able to kill us is 0%? In which case every conceivable scenario (including any plan that an ASI could come up with) would have to have a 0% chance of working? I just don't find that possible, human civilisation isn't that robust. It must be at least a 10% chance that one of those plans could work right? In which case significant efforts in AI safety to mitigate this risk are warranted. 

Not an AI safety expert, but I think you might be under-estimating the imagination a superintelligent AI may have. Or maybe you're under-estimating what a post-AGI intelligence may be capable of?

With the "killing humans through machines" option, a superintelligent AI would probably be smart enough to kill us all without taking the time to build a robot army, which would definitely raise my suspicions! Maybe it would hack nuclear weapons and blow us all up, invent and release an airborne super-toxin, or make a self-replicating nanobot - wouldn't see it coming, over as soon as we realised it wasn't aligned.

And for "making humans kill themselves", it might destabilise Governments with misinformation or breakdown communication channels, leading to global conflicts where we kill each other. To stay on the nuclear weapons route, maybe it tricks the USA's nuclear detection system into thinking that nuclear weapons have been fired, and the USA retaliates causing a nuclear war. 

I think the fact that I can use my limited human intelligence to imagine multiple scenarios where AI could kill us all makes me very confident that a superintelligent AI would find additional and more effective methods. The question from my perspective isn't "can AI kill us all?" but "how likely is it that AI can kill us all?", and my answer is I don't know but definitely not 0%. So here's a huge problem that needs to be solved. 

Full disclosure, I have no idea how AI alignment will overcome that problem, but I'm very glad they're working on it. 

No problem :)

Best of luck with your A-levels!