Problem is, when people start to analyse things like this, even apart from falling into utilitarian traps, they don’t apply regular business reasoning.

There’s a bunch of effects to consider 1) improving lives right now may well improve subsequent generations lives directly 2) your future project may have a higher failure rate than your current one 3) the problems you are trying to solve may no longer be relevant in the future 4) you could be very wrong about future population growth.

All of this boils down to: you should be risk-discounting future benefits just the same way as you do future cash flows.

It's the people thinking about the bottom line who will push for the gradual enshittification of the product until it's beaming ads into people's brain, preventing them from saying anything bad about elon, forcing them to sing his praises against their will, or charging them a monthly fee for "continued autonomous breathing as a service".

Taking a good thing and fucking people over with it in every way possible is "regular business reasoning"

At a certain point it's smart to say "We have the technology to do something good, let's be extremely cautious about concerns over what's profitable and focus on doing what's right with it"

I really loved the "Common People" episode from Black Mirror. IMO it's the best episode of the whole series. It shows the enshittification cycle of technology really well applied to technology connected to your brain.