EA - The Grabby Values Selection Thesis: What values do space-faring civilizations plausibly have? by Jim Buhler

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Grabby Values Selection Thesis: What values do space-faring civilizations plausibly have?, published by Jim Buhler on May 6, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Summary: The Grabby Values Selection Thesis (or GST, for short) is the thesis that some values are more expansion-conducive (and therefore more adapted to space colonization races) than others such that we should – all else equal – expect such values to be more represented among the grabbiest civilizations/AGIs. In this post, I present and argue for GST, and raise some considerations regarding how strong and decisive we should expect this selection effect to be. The stronger it is, the more we should expect our successors – in worlds where the future of humanity is big – to have values more grabbing-prone than ours. The same holds for grabby aliens relative to us present humans. While these claims are trivially true, they seem to support conclusions that most longtermists have not paid attention to, such as “the most powerful civilizations don’t care about what the moral truth might be” (see my previous post), and “they don’t care (much) about suffering” (see my forthcoming next post).The thesisSpreading to new territories can be motivated by very different values and seems to be a convergent instrumental goal. Whatever a given agent wants, they likely have some incentive to accumulate resources and spread to new territories in order to better achieve their goal(s).However, not all moral preferences are equally conducive to expansion. Some of them value (intrinsically or instrumentally) colonization more than others. For instance, agents who value spreading intrinsically will likely colonize more and/or more efficiently than those who disvalue being the direct cause of something like “space pollution”, in the interstellar context.Therefore, there is a selection effect where the most powerful civilizations/AGIs are those who have the values that are the most prone to “grabbing”. This is the Grabby Values Selection Thesis (GST), which is the formalization and generalization of an idea that has been expressed by Robin Hanson (1998).We can differentiate between two sub-selection effects, here:The intra-civ (grabby values) selection: Within a civilization, those who colonize space and influence the future of the civilization are those with the most grabby-prone values. Here is a specific plausible instance of that selection effect, given by Robin Hanson (1998): “Far enough away from the origin of an expanding wave of interstellar colonization, and in the absence of property rights in virgin oases, a selection effect should make leading edge colonists primarily value whatever it takes to stay at the leading edge.”The inter-civ (grabby values) selection: The civilizations that end up with the most grabby-prone values will get more territory than the others.Do these two different sub-selection effects matter equally? My current impression is that this mainly depends on the likelihood of an early value lock-in – or of design escaping selection early and longlastingly, in Robin Hanson’s (2022) terminology – where “early” means “before grabby values get the time to be selected for within the civilization”. If such an early value lock-in occurs, the inter-civ selection effect is the only one left. If it doesn’t occur, however, the importance of the intra-civ selection effect seems vastly superior to that of the inter-civ one. This is mainly explained by the fact that there is very likely much more room for selection effects within a (not-locked-in) civilization than in between different civilizations.GST seems trivially true. It is pretty obvious that all values are not equal in terms of how much they value (intrinsically or instrumentally) space colonization, and that those who value space expansion more ...