Simon Friederich’s research while affiliated with University of Groningen and other places

Agents are said to be “clueless” if they are unable to predict some ethically important consequences of their actions. Some philosophers have argued that such “cluelessness'' is widespread and creates problems for certain approaches to ethics. According to Hilary Greaves, a particularly problematic type of cluelessness, namely, “complex” cluelessness, affects attempts to do good as effectively as possible, as suggested by proponents of “Effective Altruism,” because we are typically clueless about the long-term consequences of such interventions. As a reaction, she suggests focusing on interventions that are long-term oriented from the start. This paper argues for three claims: first, that David Lewis’ distinction between sensitive and insensitive causation can help us better understand the differences between genuinely “complex” and more harmless “simple” cluelessness; second, that Greaves’ worry about complex cluelessness can be mitigated for attempts to do near-term good; and, third, that Greaves’ recommendation to focus on long term-oriented interventions in response to complex cluelessness is not promising as a strategy specifically for avoiding complex cluelessness. There are systematic reasons why the actual effects of serious attempts to beneficially shape the long-term future are inherently difficult to predict and why, hence, such attempts are prone to backfiring.

Some philosophers and machine learning experts have speculated that superintelligent Artificial Intelligences (AIs), if and when they arrive on the scene, will wrestle away power from humans, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Dan Hendrycks has recently buttressed such worries by arguing that AI systems will undergo evolution by natural selection, which will endow them with instinctive drives for self-preservation, dominance and resource accumulation that are typical of evolved creatures. In this paper, we argue that this argument is not compelling as it stands. Evolutionary processes, as we point out, can be more or less Darwinian along a number of dimensions. Making use of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s framework of Darwinian spaces, we argue that the more evolution is top-down, directed and driven by intelligent agency, the less paradigmatically Darwinian it becomes. We then apply the concept of “domestication” to AI evolution, which, although theoretically satisfying the minimal definition of natural selection, is channeled through the minds of fore-sighted and intelligent agents, based on selection criteria desirable to them (which could be traits like docility, obedience and non-aggression). In the presence of such intelligent planning, it is not clear that selection of AIs, even selection in a competitive and ruthless market environment, will end up favoring “selfish” traits. In the end, however, we do agree with Hendrycks’ conditionally: If superintelligent AIs end up “going feral” and competing in a truly Darwinian fashion, reproducing autonomously and without human supervision, this could pose a grave danger to human societies.

The Kochen-Specker theorem shows that it is impossible to assign sharp values to all dynamical variables in quantum mechanics in such a way that the algebraic relations among the values of dynamical variables whose self-adjoint operators commute are the same as those among the operators themselves. We point out that, for quantum theories obtained by quantizing some classical theory, this condition -- Kochen-Specker non-contextuality -- is implausible from the start because quantization usually changes algebraic relations. We illustrate this point and its relevance using various examples of dynamical variables quantized via Weyl quantization and coherent state quantization. Our observations suggest that the relevance of the Kochen-Specker theorem to the question of whether one can assign sharp values to all dynamical variables is rather limited.

If and when artificial intelligence systems become superhuman in more aspects of analytic reasoning, this will inevitably have a strong impact on the social organisation of science, including academic writing, reviewing, and publishing. We consider how norms of academic publishing should be adjusted as this happens. To do so, we propose four intuitively plausible desiderata that norms of academic publishing should fulfil in the age of increasingly advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and argue that there are no “quick fixes” to current norms that fulfil these desiderata. To indicate the scale of change needed to prepare academic publishing for the era of increasingly advanced AI, we tentatively sketch a more promising novel system of norms. Our proposal centres around the idea that AI systems should “sign off’’ on statements that outline the human and AI contributions to academic research. We discuss possible challenges for this proposal and highlight the type of technological and regulatory infrastructure that would be needed to enable it.

Gauge symmetries play a central role, both in the mathematical foundations as well as the conceptual construction of modern (particle) physics theories. However, it is yet unclear whether they form a necessary component of theories, or whether they can be eliminated. It is also unclear whether they are merely an auxiliary tool to simplify (and possibly localize) calculations or whether they contain independent information. Therefore their status, both in physics and philosophy of physics, remains to be fully clarified. This Element reviews the current state of affairs on both the philosophy and the physics side. In particular, it focuses on the circumstances in which the restriction of gauge theories to gauge invariant information on an observable level is warranted, using the Brout-Englert-Higgs theory as an example of particular current importance. Finally, the authors determine a set of yet to be answered questions to clarify the status of gauge symmetries.

Recent astrophysical findings suggest that the era during which the Universe is habitable has just begun. This raises the question whether the entire Universe may at some point in the future be filled with intelligent life. Hanson et al . (2021, The Astrophysical Journal 922 , 182) argued that we can be confident that the Universe will, by cosmic standards, soon be dominated by imperialist civilizations which expand rapidly, persist long and make drastic changes to the volumes they control. The main motivation for this ‘grabby civilizations’ hypothesis is that it supposedly provides a good explanation of why we are so early in cosmic history. In this paper, we criticize this motivation and suggest that it fails, for reasons analogous to why the notorious Doomsday argument fails. In the last part of the paper we broaden our discussion and argue that it may be rational to assign a rather low prior probability to the grabby civilizations hypothesis. For instance, if there are any civilizations that expand rapidly and indefinitely, they may well not make any drastic changes to the volumes they inhabit, potentially for strategic reasons. Hence, we call for epistemic caution and humility regarding the question of the long-term evolution of intelligence in the Universe.

A transition to a world with artificial general intelligence (AGI) may occur within the next few decades. This transition may give rise to catastrophic risks from misaligned AGI, which have received a significant amount of attention, deservedly. Here I argue that AGI systems that are intent-aligned—they always try to do what their operators want them to do—would also create catastrophic risks, mainly due to the power that they concentrate on their operators. With time, that power would almost certainly be catastrophically exploited, potentially resulting in human extinction or permanent dystopia. I suggest that liberal democracies, if they decide to allow the development of AGI, may react to this threat by letting AGI take shape as an intergenerational social project, resulting in an arrangement where AGI is not intent-aligned but symbiotic with humans. I provide some tentative ideas on what the resulting arrangement may look like and consider what speaks for and what against aiming for intent-aligned AGI as an intermediate step.

Abstract: »Spannungen innerhalb von Energiegerechtigkeit: Wenn globale Energiepolitik Ungleichheit verstärkt«. Global energy justice remains far out of reach. If the goal of energy justice is the universal, equitable, and democratic provision of safe, affordable, and sustainable energy services, the interna-tional community currently lacks the physical, ideational, or governance in-frastructure necessary for its realization. Instead, access to energy remains radically unequal, continuing greenhouse gas emissions are creating inter-generational sabotage, and fossil fuel revenues routinely corrupt democratic politics. In addition to distributive injustice, global energy governance also creates dilemmas of procedure and recognition that are our focus. Here, we first identify inherent tensions between local democratic sovereignty and global energy justice and then argue that existing energy governance infra-structures often amplify powerful actors’ leverage over the energy choices and strategies of less powerful communities. We conclude by discussing the design of a governance infrastructure that could promote climate mitigation and energy access goals without exploiting international inequalities in ways that risk undermining justice.

Policy instruments promoting sustainability, such as investment taxonomies, are playing an increasing role in guiding the allocation of financial resources internationally. But can policy instruments define sustainability in ways that are both operational (i.e. assessable via replicable procedures) and which specify practices that can reliably be expected to enhance future generations' welfare? This paper analyses candidate definitions of sustainability and identifies a dilemma: while various definitions identify a ‘capital’ variable whose value can indeed be determined empirically; we have no reason to assume that preservation of any specific capital variable will maximise expected future welfare. By contrast, sustainability can be defined ‘dynamically’ in terms of activities that will, on expectation, lead to future developmental trajectories with high welfare. But, as we show through discussion of concrete examples, ‘dynamic sustainability’ cannot readily be operationalised. We conclude that what qualifies as ‘sustainable’ will remain a subject of political dispute and that authoritative comprehensive assessments of ‘sustainability’ will remain chimeric. We suggest that selecting a narrow class of specific measures, such as of life‐cycle greenhouse gas emissions, might lead to more effective and less contentious approaches to resource allocation.

In recent years, there has been an intense public debate about whether and, if so, to what extent investments in nuclear energy should be part of strategies to mitigate climate change. Here we address this question from an ethical perspective, evaluating different strategies of energy system development in terms of three ethical criteria, which will differentially appeal to proponents of different normative ethical frameworks. Starting from a standard analysis of climate change as arising from an intergenerational collective action problem, we evaluate whether contributions from nuclear energy to future zero-emissions energy systems can be expected to increase the economic competitiveness and technical feasibility of such systems when compared with fossil fuel-based ones. For many socio-economic and geographic contexts, our review of the energy system modelling literature suggests the answer to this question is “yes”. We conclude that, from the point of view of climate change mitigation, investments in nuclear energy as part of a broader energy portfolio will be ethically required in these contexts to minimize the risks of decarbonization failure, and thus the tail risks of catastrophic global warming. Finally, we consider which other aspects of nuclear energy deployment, apart from climate change, have the potential to overturn the ultimate ethical verdict on investments in nuclear energy. We suggest that considerations of its possible effects -- whether beneficial or adverse -- on the proliferation of nuclear weapons are the most plausible candidates.