Policy-based deterrence for the 21st century.
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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Individual questions that hang off the main argument without belonging inside it. Each is labelled by how finished it is: zeigarnik means an idea I dumped into a coding agent and published without reviewing what it wrote, 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.
If nihilism is true, caution costs nothing that matters; if it is false, extinction may be the worst thing that can happen. A branch that says nothing matters cannot outvote one that says this matters enormously. Philosophers got here first, and one of them thinks the argument breaks.
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.
Illusionism denies the one fact the sequence is built on. It does not strictly imply that nothing matters, but it gets closer than its defenders admit, and the case for precaution has to be rebuilt without qualia to survive it.
This site's central line is that shifting the Nash equilibrium is easier than solving alignment. It describes the equilibrium it wants to leave in detail and the one it would arrive at almost not at all. Four players, checked one at a time for a profitable unilateral deviation.
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.
About 170,000 people die every day, and an aligned superintelligence might stop that. I take the number seriously and still think it is a bad argument for speed: at full strength it needs extinction to be no worse than everyone dying of old age, and it quietly assumes the hard part, alignment, goes right.