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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Any real-world adoption of these ideas would require democratic deliberation, statutory authority, and robust safeguards against misuse. References to enforcement, penalties, or "bounties" are illustrative models, not instructions or invitations to engage in private policing or unlawful conduct. Nothing here is an accusation against, or a call to act against, any person or organisation; see non-targeting.
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Intended to be read in order. This is a much more detailed look at my (mild) philosophical underpinnings, and how the actual deterrence mechanism extinction bounties works and why.
I recommend you read my five-minute pitch first. This is a lot longer.
Part I · Why Bother
The one fact about qualia you have direct access to is your own, and you cannot get behind that fact to check anyone else's.
Absent proof, best answer I have found to the problem of other minds, of who is or is not a moral patient, is to use a similarity-weighted, pluralist prior.
The successionist error: treating capability as evidence of moral patienthood. It is not, and people are strangely reluctant to say so.
Not suffering, not human extinction as such: a cosmos in which nothing experiences anything, and which therefore has no moral relevance at all.
Instrumental convergence, Bostrom and Yudkowsky, and an intuition about measure: the aligned targets are a vanishingly thin set.
Part II · What To Do
A thousand-dollar littering fine, a fifty-dollar camera, and the small market that grows up around them.
Hanson's fine-insured bounties in general form, and the conspiracy arithmetic that makes silence expensive.
The insurance market is the part that does the actual deterring, and it does it before anyone is ever charged.
The target is not punishment and not even prevention of any particular project. It is to make the marginal researcher take a different job.
A mechanism that stops at a border relocates the risk instead of reducing it. What adoption would actually have to look like, and what it would still fail to reach.
How this proposal stacks up against the other things people suggest, including on the axes where it loses badly.
The strongest objections to the mechanism, collected in one place, stated at full strength, and answered only where I can answer them.
What a serious first version looks like, starting somewhere that is not AI at all.