Policy-based deterrence for the 21st century.
Individual questions that hang off the main argument without belonging inside it. Each is labelled by how finished it is — stub means little more than a title and an outline, alpha means drafted but unsettled, evergreen means I am happy with it and revise it in place.
The objection is not that insurers would refuse. It is that in most jurisdictions they are forbidden. The answer is that a bounty is not a punishment for intentional harm, and the industry already has the machinery for exactly this.
What this proposal asks for is not a world government. It is one more overlapping legal order in a life that already contains several — and the rigorous case for that is about credible commitment, not about liberty.
Mandatory coverage fixes the judgment-proof problem and quietly hands private insurers the power to decide who may do frontier research. I think there is a third option, and I no longer think this fork is a coin flip.
Everywhere else on this site the chilling effect is scored as a cost. It is worth one page arguing the opposite: it is the only output that matters, and the steady state it aims at is a world where nothing happens.
A map of the serious attempts to break the AI-risk argument, what happened to each, and whether the pattern of survival is evidence of a good theory or of an unfalsifiable one.
The empty universe is negative utilitarianism's global optimum and my worst case. That is not a disagreement about weights — it is a disagreement about the sign of the term.
Extinction Bounties publishes theoretical economic and legal mechanisms intended to stimulate scholarly and public debate on catastrophic-risk governance. The site offers policy analysis and advocacy only in the sense of outlining possible legislative or contractual frameworks.
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