No S-risk

(Peter https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/the-weight-of-forever)

The political programme of longtermism is founded upon a singular speculative thesis: that we are currently at a crux point in history, where our actions may have an outsized influence upon the shape of everything that comes after. We’re in the middle of a period of rapid social and technological change, yet at the same time we’re more interconnected as a species than we’ve ever been before. MacAskill argues that this means our society is in a state like molten glass: easily shaped into new configurations that once they settle might persist for an extremely long time, influencing the lives of untold trillions across a vast swathe of space. We thus have a responsibility to ensure that it ends up in the right configuration, which first and foremost means avoiding the wrong ones. The worst outcome would be our complete extinction. This would not only eliminate whatever good we currently bring to the world, but would foreclose the possibility of those far greater goods of which we’re capable. Once we account for this loss of potential, extinction events are so much worse than even near-extinction events that tiny probabilities demand decisive action to mitigate against them. MacAskill admits that there might technically be even worse states than extinction, such as societies designed to perpetuate endless torture, but he thinks that these are vanishingly unlikely, because they require unsustainably malign intent.