Summary:
We make choices every day that implicitly assign value to different lives. Here's an attempt to build a framework for quantifying our intuitions and communicate them with others. It uses QALY but adds 2 major terms: computation and externalities.
Motivation to make this equation
We are faced with assigning value to different lives constantly. Whether to buy free-range eggs or cage-free or whatever is cheapest. Governments have to make decisions about how much to fund cancer research (a mostly first-world disease) or "neglected tropical diseases" that cause probably many times more total human-lived years of suffering. This framework is my attempt to help with measuring and communicating our different intuitions of the value of different lives, ranging from simple bacteria to animals to humans to superintelligent AIs.
I hope that it will help at some point with solving the real-life cause prioritization, including:
- Should everyone be vegetarian or vegan?
- How much work should go into end of life care?
- Could a paperclip maximizing AGI have the same value as all of humanity?
- Should we spend more on education or healthcare?
Moral Uncertainty Note: The actual solution to "what things are valuable" is probably beyond human intelligence to figure out, and so this is meant to be a "best I can do for now" framework to make real choices now rather than have no framework and keep making less informed choices.
Each person will have their own coefficients, but this hopefully helps people understand where their intuitions vary. Some of these are very complex because we don't know most of the effects of one choice or another, but this framework helps with at least simplifying the work required to estimate the value of different lives.
Here's the equation that I came up with:
In words: the value of a system (which could be a single life or a bunch of lives or alternate worlds) is equal to the integral of quality of the lives times computation with respect to time plus external effects with respect to time. Each of these terms has many factors that go into them, and we'll go through them individually. It's similar to the standard measure of the value of life that many governments use (QALY), but it has a computation adjustment and an externality adjustment. See spreadsheet for examples of trolley problems exploring consequences of equation.
Next steps:
Quality of Life:
Quality of life is measure of something like the emotionally positive life.
I measure QualityofLife on a scale from -10 to 10, where -10 is really sad and 10 is really happy. This is incredibly vague and subjectively estimated at this point. It's hard to give consistent values that everyone would agree on. Here are a few ways it might be calculated:
- The self-reported happiness and sadness
- The remembering self
- Guessing based on how well an agent is achieving its goals. How many nuts has the squirrel stored? What is the accuracy of a simple artificial neural network on recognizing faces? How many copies has a bacteriophage produced in a bacterium host?
- MRI examination of brain wave resonance.
- Examination of amounts of 'happiness' neurotransmitters and connectivity.
- Consensus of 10 human observers
- Qualia research
- Check out Bentham felicitous calculus 7 factors intensity, duration,
Further investigation:
- would include prospect theory and happiness economics.
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LhjPuggQNmqI5vJvNQ5jmeB7vNDWF46nZQ3BXnXp5Wo/edit#heading=h.limy4axbabq2
Non-human animals seem to have happiness and sadness (rethink table)
The integral sign and dT in the equation simply mean "with respect to time" or adding up all the moments under the curve. Similar to QALY. Here's an example below, showing the quality of life over the lifetime of a person.
The height of each bar represents how happy a person was at one moment on a scale of -10 to 10. The chart shows all of the moments in a person's lifetime. Adding all the happy moments and the negative sad moments gives the total amount of happiness in a person's lifetime, which I call QualityofLife
Here's another example comparing 2 happy hermit clones, the same in every other regard except for happiness level during their lives. Hermit 1 lives life at a constant 4, and hermit 2 lives their life at a constant 8, or twice as happy. This equation would say that hermit 2's life is twice as valuable as hermit 1's.
dT, Time
A happy person that exists for 5 seconds is half as valuable of as the same happy person existing for 10 seconds.
The time component also allows a life to be examined with time.
Potential to gain in computation, value, valence, and externalities. The cow galaxy could evolve superintelligence and have the same value as our galaxy A single human could self modify and grow in size to be as complex as an earth full of humans A sad person could have an epiphany and live the next 50 years happily. This should be some kind of probability score This should be rolled into expected flours QALY
Computation
If the brain is an information processing system, cognition and consciousness are a form of computation. This term tries to quantify the experiencing per moment (consciousness) that entity that enjoys or endures the Quality of Life and the cognition that an entity is capable of per second. (some portion of this should be 'unique' computation, so as to reflect that creating duplicates that have duplicate lives is less valuable than unique lives.)
The happiness of a superintelligence is more valuable than the happiness of a beetle. Also the same way two happy people are more valuable than one happy person. How can we measure this more precisely? I don't have a good formula yet, but the Trolly Problems Spreadsheet has one method of calculating it.
Some possible ways of measuring this:
- Type: Some types of computation are likely to be more valuable than others
- Measurement of complexity Kolmogorov or compressibility
- linkages at various scales. phenomena which emerge from a collection of interacting objects
From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity>
- Is complete randomness complex? No.
- Data compression
- Novelty
- Duplicates matter less. The extreme are duplicates that will have no interaction with the world or each other, in which they don't matter at all.
- Similar experiences matter less also, since they are more compressible.
- This has large implications:
- It implies that novelty is good, sameness is less good.
- Equality is less good than diversity of experiences
- Processing speed: Operations per second
- Subjective time: Speed of processing. If two identical uploads run at different speeds then the faster one could experience more cheer
- Connectivity, or communications internally per second, TEPS
- Bits/sec
- IO from external world to internal
- Consciousness: awareness of the world that cause changes internally with internal representations.
- See Moral Patienthood report by Luke Muehlhauser
- Integrated information theory:
- http://integratedinformationtheory.org/
- Scott aaronson doesn't like this as a measure for consciousness.
- Graph theory description of consciousness of a mind
- Memory: memory of the past, ability to store intermediate results
- Information in the theoretic sense. Measure of surprise
- Efficiency at doing these
- Uniqueness of compute and memory
- Ability to run Valuable Programs
- Time it takes to run Valuable Programs
External Effects
What effects does the particular life have on those morally valuable entities around it because it exists, rather than doesn't?
How does the existence or resources of one life affect other lives flourishing?
The life of a fish might be more valuable because of its nutrition for a human.
The life of a lizard might be much more valuable because of the happiness it brings a human mind. Things that wouldn't have existed without the subject.
Definition of Flourishing:
Flourishing is "a state where people experience positive emotions, positive psychological functioning and positive social functioning, most of the time,"[web 1] living "within an optimal range of human functioning."[1] It is a descriptor and measure of positive mental health and overall life well-being,[1][2] and includes multiple components and concepts, such as cultivating strengths, subjective well-being, "goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience."[1] Flourishing is the opposite of both pathology and languishing, which are described as living a life that feels hollow and empty.
From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flourishing>
Add more detail from here: Ethics of Non-Human Animals
Does this take into account the counterfactuals?
Total system complexity