Values spreading is often more important than extinction risk

Abstract

I personally have mixed feelings about efforts to reduce extinction risk because I think space colonization would potentially give rise to astronomical amounts of suffering. However, even if I thought reducing extinction risk was a good idea, I would still think that promoting desire to create utilitronium would have much higher expected value because relatively speaking it’s a much less exploited area to work in, and values seem more malleable and arbitrary than trajectories like whether humans go extinct. That said, it’s important to remember that support for utilitronium is still somewhat and maybe even mostly determined by factors outside our control. Moreover, utilitronium supporters may wish to achieve gains from trade through compromise with agents of other value systems rather than just pushing for what they want in an untempered fashion.