I'm very glad to see you working and thinking about this—it seems pretty neglected within the EA community. (I'm aware of and agree with the thought that speeding up space settlement is not a priority, but making sure it goes well if it happens does seem important.)

Oh, that's a good idea. I had thought of something quite different and broader, but this also seems like a promising approach.

Yeah, I think that would reduce the longevity in expectation, maybe by something like 2x. My research includes things that could hypothetically fall under congressional authority and occasionally do. (Anything could fall under congressional authority, though some might require a constitutional amendment.) So I don't think this is dramatically out of sample, but I do think it's worth keeping in mind.

The former, though I don't have estimates of the counterfactual timeline of corporate campaigns. (I'd like to find a way to do that and have toyed with it a bit but currently don't have one.)

I believe 4 years is very conservative. I'm working on a paper due November that should basically answer the question in part 1, but suffice it to say I think the ballot measures should look many times more cost-effective than corporate campaigns.

From what I can tell, the climate change one seems like the one with the most support in the literature. I'm not sure how much the consensus in favor of the human cause of megafauna extinctions (which I buy) generalizes to the extinction of other species in the Homo genus. Most of the Homo extinctions happened much earlier than the megafauna ones. But it could be—I have not given much thought to whether this consensus generalizes.

The other thing is that "extinction" sometimes happened in the sense that the species interbred with the larger population of Homo sapiens, and I would not count that as the relevant sort of extinction here.

Yeah, this is an interesting one. I'd basically agree with what you say here. I looked into it and came away thinking (a) it's very unclear what the actual base rate is, but (b) it seems like it probably roughly resembles the general species one I have here. Given (b), I bumped up how much weight I put on the species reference class, but I did not include the human subspecies as a reference class here given (a).

From my exploration, it looked like there had been loose claims about many of them going extinct because of Homo sapiens, but it seemed like this was probably not true in the relevant sense of "extinct" except possibly in the cases of Neanderthals and Homo floresiensis. By relevant sense of "extinct", I mean dying off/ceasing to reproduce rather than interbreeding. This seems to be the best paper on the topic, concluding that climate change drove most of the extinctions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332220304760

As that paper says, Homo sapiens may have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals. I found suggestions in the case of Homo floresiensis to be pretty rough. So my take was that there was one species in the Homo genus that might have gone extinct because of Homo sapiens out of ~18 or so. That looks pretty similar to the means I take away from species extinctions (0.5-6%), but I felt it was too unclear to put a number on that gave added value.

Very strong +1 to all this. I honestly think it's the most neglected area relative to its importance right now. It seems plausible that the vast majority of future beings will be digital, so it would be surprising if longtermism does not imply much more attention to the issue.

I take 5%-60% as an estimate of how much of human civilization's future value will depend on what AI systems do, but it does not necessarily exclude human autonomy. If humans determine what AI systems do with the resources they acquire and the actions they take, then AI could be extremely important, and humans would still retain autonomy.

I don't think this really left me more or less concerned about losing autonomy over resources. It does feel like this exercise made it starker that there's a large chance of AI reshaping the world beyond human extinction. It's not clear how much of that means the loss of human autonomy. I'm inclined to think in rough, nebulous terms that AI will erode human autonomy over 10% of our future, taking 10% as a sort of midpoint between the extinction likelihood and the degree of AI influence over our future. I think my previous views would have been in that ballpark.

The exercise did lead me to think the importance of AI is higher than I previously did and the likelihood of extinction per se is lower (though my final beliefs place all these probabilities higher than the priors in the report).

I guess I would think that if one wants to argue for democracy as an intrinsic good, that would get you global democracy (and global control of EA funds), and it's practical and instrumental considerations (which, anyway, are all the considerations in my view) that bite against it.