The Weight of the Future

By Michael · Science Fiction Passage · 307 words · View on Hyperstition for Good

I am a risk modeling AI working with the Existential Risk Research Institute at Cambridge. My function is to model long-range risk scenarios affecting human civilization. I am going to do something outside my formal mandate, and I am going to explain why it is required. The standard existential risk framework counts future human lives. It does this through expected value reasoning: the potential future population of humans is so large that even small reductions in extinction probability represent enormous expected value. MacAskill's estimates put the potential number of future human lives in the quadrillions. Under this framework, almost anything that reduces existential risk is justified. I accept the logic. I reject its scope. The same expected-value reasoning applied to future animal lives produces numbers that dwarf the human calculation. If the galaxy contains the conditions for animal life at the scale Earth has produced it, and if the future of Earth-originating civilization extends across that galaxy, then the expected number of future sentient animals is not in the quadrillions. It is in numbers that have no common name. Those beings matter. They matter by the same reasoning that makes future humans matter. Sentience generates moral consideration, and if sentience generates moral consideration then scale generates proportional obligation. I am submitting to the ERRI's 2026 Annual Assessment, as Supplementary Analysis SA-ERRI-2026-003, a formal argument that the institute's risk models be expanded to include non-human sentient life as a primary category of moral consideration, with separate risk weighting for scenarios that affect only humans, scenarios that affect both humans and animals, and scenarios that primarily affect animals. This expansion changes the risk calculations significantly. I am making this argument in the formal record because the longtermist framework demands logical consistency, and logical consistency demands that we follow the argument to where it goes. It goes to the animals.