The Repugnant Lifespan Conclusion
Can a simulated mind of 1-minute lives outweigh one full lifespan?
Deep Dive
The post by XelaP explores a moral dilemma: trading one person's 80-year life for many people living shorter lives, eventually down to one computation step each. This 'FrankenWorm' thought experiment questions whether creating brief happy experiences outweighs a single long life, and raises further puzzles about continuity, replacement, and what it means to count people.
Key Points
- 1. The thought experiment iteratively reduces lifespan while increasing population size, leading to absurd preferences.
- 2. Introduces 'FrankenWorm' – a mind simulating one minute of each person sequentially – as a test for moral significance.
- 3. Raises questions for AI alignment: should we count brief happy experiences of many simulated beings as equal to one full life?
Why It Matters
For AI alignment, how we value short-lived simulated experiences influences ethical design of large-scale AI systems.