This is a pretty bad summary of Bostrom's views at least. It's not about an ethical obligation to create digital people, more a way to quantify what's at stake

This is a pretty bad summary of Bostrom's views at least. It's not about an ethical obligation to create digital people, more a way to quantify what's at stake if humanity were to be destroyed. The point that he makes is that most people use 8B deaths as the "cost" when doing cost benefit analysis around a hypothetical apocalypse. Bostrom thinks the cost is much higher since it should also include all humans that will ever exist. When you try to quantify how large that could possibly be, you run into the possibility of far-future digital humans and he includes those in his calculation.