David Pearce - A Negative Utilitarian Vision for AGI (Worthy Successor, Ep. 34)

This is Daniel Fagelli. You're tuned into The Trajectory, and this is the 34th episode of our Worthy Successor series, where we ask about what kind of life and mind should carry on long beyond humanity, even if we're not here anymore. Our guest this week is someone that it's really hard to leave out of the conversation when you're talking about the relevance of consciousness, of sentient valence in the world. David Pierce is a philosopher known for a great many things. He's a negative utilitarian. He's known for the abolitionist project, the idea of getting rid of suffering and sort of the the planet earth and eventually our light cone, if at all possible. And he has some very well thought out arguments around machine consciousness and around what he thinks a good future would be. I've learned so much from David over the years, probably the last, uh, 13 years or so the first time I interviewed David. He's contributed a lot to my thought and I have a lot to say at the end of this episode because there's clearly a lot of areas where our perspectives also differ. But to have him in the mix for worthy success, it was a real joy and it was a lot of fun to talk with David. I want to make a quick mention here. I caught him when he was in Portugal, the best we could get was his phone and the cell connection that he could get when he was out there visiting friends or something like that. So the video's so-so, but the discussion itself is rather rich. And in the outro, I'll kind of cover some of the main points that I think are salient for the bigger, sort of worthy successor thought experiment. So without further ado, we'll fly right in. This is the great living philosopher, David Pierce, here on The Trajectory. So David, welcome to the show. It's good to be with you, Dan. It's been a long time. It's been an awfully long time. We were just speaking off microphone. I think the first time I did an interview with you was 13 or 14 years ago. One of the earliest philosophical influences on my own thinking about the post-human trajectory of life. And it is a super pleasure to be able to have you with us here. We've got normal worthy successor questions, but I want to open with some of your questions. grounding beliefs around consciousness and valence um which influence me uh pretty heavily and i i think are a great place for us to start because it is much of what i think you've contributed to this philosophical space um for you the more or less soul uh axis of value is kind of the valence axis of sort of pain pleasure in some way shape or form uh I want to kind of get your tertiary description of how you came to that conclusion and what grounds you there, and then kind of pick around that a little bit. So if we could start there, that'd be great.

Yes, as far as I can tell, the pleasure-pain axis discloses the world's inbuilt metric of disvalue, and that though we can imagine alien civilizations that have, let's say, an inverted planet, color spectrum what one can't imagine is an alien civilization with an inverted pleasure pain axis and as you probably gathered i think uh overriding ethical obligation as a species is to phase out the biology of suffering