We can think long term without being long termists- fixation on the future justifies unlimited genocide in the present

(Phil, a PhD candidate in philosophy at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. ,)

What I find most unsettling about the longtermist ideology isn’t just that it contains all the ingredients necessary for a genocidal catastrophe in the name of realizing astronomical amounts of far-future “value.” Nor is it that this religious ideology has already infiltrated the consciousness of powerful actors who could, for example, “save 41 [million] people at risk of starvation” but instead use their wealth to fly themselves to space. Even more chilling is that many people in the community believe that their mission to “protect” and “preserve” humanity’s “longterm potential” is so important that they have little tolerance for dissenters. These include critics who might suggest that longtermism is dangerous, or that it supports what Frances Lee Ansley calls white supremacy (given the implication, outlined and defended by Beckstead, that we should prioritize the lives of people in rich countries). When one believes that existential risk is the most important concept ever invented, as someone at the Future of Humanity Institute once told me, and that failing to realize “our potential” would not merely be wrong but a moral catastrophe of literally cosmic proportions, one will naturally be inclined to react strongly against those who criticize this sacred dogma. When you believe the stakes are that high, you may be quite willing to use extraordinary means to stop anyone who stands in your way. In fact, numerous people have come forward, both publicly and privately, over the past few years with stories of being intimidated, silenced, or “canceled.” (Yes, “cancel culture” is a real problem here.) I personally have had three colleagues back out of collaborations with me after I self-published a short critique of longtermism, not because they wanted to, but because they were pressured to do so from longtermists in the community. Others have expressed worries about the personal repercussions of openly criticizing Effective Altruism or the longtermist ideology. For example, the moral philosopher Simon Knutsson wrote a critique several years ago in which he notes, among other things, that Bostrom appears to have repeatedly misrepresented his academic achievements in claiming that, as he wrote on his website in 2006, “my performance as an undergraduate set a national record in Sweden.” (There is no evidence that this is true.) The point is that, after doing this, Knutsson reports that he became “concerned about his safety” given past efforts to censure certain ideas by longtermists with clout in the community. This might sound hyperbolic, but it’s consistent with a pattern of questionable behavior from leaders in the Effective Altruism movement more generally. For example, one of the first people to become an Effective Altruist after the movement was born circa 2009, Simon Jenkins, reports an incident in which he criticized an idea within Effective Altruism on a Facebook group run by the community. Within an hour, not only had his post been deleted but someone who works for the Centre for Effective Altruism actually called his personal phone to instruct him not to question the movement. “We can’t have people posting anything that suggests that Giving What We Can [an organization founded by Ord] is bad,” as Jenkins recalls. These are just a few of several dozen stories that people have shared with me after I went public with some of my own unnerving experiences. All of this is to say that I’m not especially optimistic about convincing longtermists that their obsession with our “vast and glorious” potential (quoting Ord again) could have profoundly harmful consequences if it were to guide actual policy in the world. As the Swedish scholar Olle Häggström has disquietingly noted, if political leaders were to take seriously the claim that saving billions of living, breathing, actual people today is morally equivalent to negligible reductions in existential risk, who knows what atrocities this might excuse? If the ends justify the means, and the “end” in this case is a veritable techno-Utopian playground full of 1058 simulated posthumans awash in “the pulsing ecstasy of love,” as Bostrom writes in his grandiloquent “Letter from Utopia,” would any means be off-limits? While some longtermists have recently suggested that there should be constraints on which actions we can take for the far future, others like Bostrom have literally argued that preemptive violence and even a global surveillance system should remain options for ensuring the realization of “our potential.” It’s not difficult to see how this way of thinking could have genocidally catastrophic consequences if political actors were to “[take] Bostrom’s argument to heart,” in Häggström’s words. I should emphasize that rejecting longtermism does not mean that one must reject long-term thinking. You ought to care equally about people no matter when they exist, whether today, next year, or in a couple billion years henceforth. If we shouldn’t discriminate against people based on their spatial distance from us, we shouldn’t discriminate against them based on their temporal distance, either. Many of the problems we face today, such as climate change, will have devastating consequences for future generations hundreds or thousands of years in the future. That should matter. We should be willing to make sacrifices for their wellbeing, just as we make sacrifices for those alive today by donating to charities that fight global poverty. But this does not mean that one must genuflect before the altar of “future value” or “our potential,” understood in techno-Utopian terms of colonizing space, becoming posthuman, subjugating the natural world, maximizing economic productivity, and creating massive computer simulations stuffed with 1045 digital beings (on Greaves and MacAskill’s estimate if we were to colonize the Milky Way). Care about the long term, I like to say, but don’t be a longtermist. Superintelligent machines aren’t going to save us, and climate change really should be one of our top global priorities, whether or not it prevents us from becoming simulated posthumans in cosmic computers.