Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Disappointing Futures Might Be As Important As Existential Risks, published by MichaelDickens on the AI Alignment Forum. Confidence: Possible Summary Perhaps the most concerning risk to civilization is that we continue to exist for millennia and nothing particularly bad happens, but that we never come close to achieving our potential—that is, we end up in a "disappointing future." [More] A disappointing future might occur if, for example: we never leave the solar system; wild animal suffering continues; or we never saturate the universe with maximally flourishing beings. [More] In comparison to civilization's potential, a disappointing future would be nearly as bad as an existential catastrophe (and possibly worse). We can make several plausible arguments for why disappointing futures might occur. [More] According to a survey of quantitative predictions, disappointing futures appear roughly as likely as existential catastrophes. [More] Preventing disappointing futures seems less tractable than reducing existential risk, but there are some things we might be able to do. [More] Cross-posted to my website. Introduction As defined by Toby Ord in The Precipice, "An existential catastrophe is the destruction of humanity’s longterm potential." Relatedly, a disappointing future is when humans do not go extinct and civilization does not collapse or fall into a dystopia, but civilization[1] nonetheless never realizes its potential. The most salient (although perhaps not the most probable) example of a disappointing future: civilization continues to exist in essentially the same form that it has for the past few hundred years or so. If we extrapolate from civilization's current trajectory, we might expect the long-run future to have these features: The human population size stabilizes at around 10 billion. Global poverty ceases to exist, and all humans become wealthy by today's standards. Scientific and societal advances make people somewhat happier, but not transformatively so. Humans continue not to care about wild animals' welfare. Wild animal suffering continues to massively dominate human happiness, such that sentient life as a whole experiences more suffering than happiness. We never populate other planets. Call this the "naively extrapolated future". We could certainly extrapolate other plausible futures from civilization's current trajectory—for example, if we extrapolate the expanding circle of moral concern, we might predict that future humans will care much more about animals' welfare. And if humans become sufficiently technologically powerful, we might decide to end wild animal suffering. I don't actually believe the naively extrapolated future is the most plausible outcome—more on that later—but I do think if you asked most people what they expect the world to look like a thousand years from now, they'd predict something like it. A note on definitions: Under the definitions of "existential catastrophe" and "disappointing future", it's debatable whether a disappointing future counts as a type of existential catastrophe. But when people talk about interventions to reduce existential risk, they almost always focus on near-term extinction events or global catastrophes. If civilization putters around on earth for a few billion years and then goes extinct when the sun expands, that would qualify as a disappointing future. It might technically count as an existential catastrophe, but it's not what people usually mean by the term. If we want to reduce the risk of a disappointing future, we might want to focus on things other than typical x-risk interventions. Therefore, it's useful to treat disappointing futures as distinct from existential catastrophes. In this essay, I argue that disappointing futures appear comparably important to existential catastrophes. I do not atte...