Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors
Summary
- Dictators who exhibited highly narcissistic, psychopathic, or sadistic traits were involved in some of the greatest catastrophes in human history.
- Malevolent individuals in positions of power could negatively affect humanity’s long-term trajectory by, for example, exacerbating international conflict or other broad risk factors.
- Malevolent humans with access to advanced technology—such as whole brain emulation or other forms of transformative AI—could cause serious existential risks and suffering risks.
- We therefore consider interventions to reduce the expected influence of malevolent humans on the long-term future.
- The development of manipulation-proof measures of malevolence seems valuable, since they could be used to screen for malevolent humans in high-impact settings, such as heads of government or CEOs.
- We also explore possible future technologies that may offer unprecedented leverage to mitigate against malevolent traits.
- Selecting against psychopathic and sadistic tendencies in genetically enhanced, highly intelligent humans might be particularly important. However, risks of unintended negative consequences must be handled with extreme caution.
- We argue that further work on reducing malevolence would be valuable from many moral perspectives and constitutes a promising focus area for longtermist EAs.
Full article
Cite this
@online{Althaus2020,
title = {Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors},
author = {David Althaus and Tobias Baumann},
url = {https://longtermrisk.org/research/reducing-long-term-risks-from-malevolent-actors/, Summary
/media/Reducing_long_term_risks_from_malevolent_actors.pdf, PDF
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LpkXtFXdsRd4rG8Kb/reducing-long-term-risks-from-malevolent-actors, EA Forum post},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-04-29},
urldate = {2020-04-29},
howpublished = {Effective Altruism Forum},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {online}
}