There's a way around this- sort of. We can give everyone the experience of raising a child, but not necessarily the experience of having a child.
I imagine the best possible existence involves, among other things, living many simulated lives. In at least some of these lives, one's memory of previous existences might be temporarily cut off to enrich the experience.
Strange as it is to think about, within these existences, one could experience being a parent to another person. That person might have pre-existed the simulation- who knows, they might even be your parent.
Oh, interesting! If the value we care about is the experience of having children (and not having actual descendants that go live on their own lives), we can just simulate that. Unfortunately, the child "dies" in some way (or at least their memories of being your child are erased). No frontier LLM thought of this when I did my standard "ask for objections" part of the pre-release checklist.
You didn't consider that we might deliberately engineer the desires of newly created people to avert this issue. Since if somebody doesn't desire to have kids then you don't need to worry about them contributing to exponential population growth. In principle you don't even need to go that far if you can engineer in arbitrary instinctual drives:
Since people wanting kids isn't even an issue, so long as those instincts are driven by natural mechanisms which would prevent exponential growth. For instance if people instinctively only want to reproduce with people that existed before time X, then the population is only capable of growing linearly which is no problem with cubic growth. Though I suspect almost arbitrarily many similar solutions exist once you consider engineering new people's preferences like this.
There's a way around this- sort of. We can give everyone the experience of raising a child, but not necessarily the experience of having a child.
I imagine the best possible existence involves, among other things, living many simulated lives. In at least some of these lives, one's memory of previous existences might be temporarily cut off to enrich the experience.
Strange as it is to think about, within these existences, one could experience being a parent to another person. That person might have pre-existed the simulation- who knows, they might even be your parent.
Oh, interesting! If the value we care about is the experience of having children (and not having actual descendants that go live on their own lives), we can just simulate that. Unfortunately, the child "dies" in some way (or at least their memories of being your child are erased). No frontier LLM thought of this when I did my standard "ask for objections" part of the pre-release checklist.
There's no need for their memories of being a child to be erased.
You didn't consider that we might deliberately engineer the desires of newly created people to avert this issue. Since if somebody doesn't desire to have kids then you don't need to worry about them contributing to exponential population growth. In principle you don't even need to go that far if you can engineer in arbitrary instinctual drives:
Since people wanting kids isn't even an issue, so long as those instincts are driven by natural mechanisms which would prevent exponential growth. For instance if people instinctively only want to reproduce with people that existed before time X, then the population is only capable of growing linearly which is no problem with cubic growth. Though I suspect almost arbitrarily many similar solutions exist once you consider engineering new people's preferences like this.