Re:Longtermism poses a real threat to humanity
by slowmovintarget on Friday August 04, 2023 @01:39PM
(#37003238)
Longtermism != long-term thinking.
From the article:
> Longtermism offered its own secular version of utopia, too: by reengineering ourselves, you and I might become immortal super-beings, and by spreading throughout the universe we could construct a multi-galactic utopian paradise of radical abundance, indefinite lifespans and endless happiness – a project that some leading longtermists quite literally call “paradise engineering”.
and
> However, the more I studied utopian movements that became violent, the more I was struck by two ingredients at the heart of such movements. The first was – of course – a utopian vision of the future, which believers see as containing infinite, or at least astronomical, amounts of value. The second was a broadly “utilitarian” mode of moral reasoning, which is to say the kind of means-ends reasoning above. The ends can sometimes justify the means, especially when the ends are a magical world full of immortal beings awash in “surpassing bliss and delight”, to quote Bostrom’s 2020 “Letter from Utopia”.
and...
> I have been inside the longtermist movement. I was a true believer. Longtermism was my religion after I gave up Christianity – it checked all the same boxes, except that for longtermists we must rely on ourselves to engineer paradise, rather than supernatural deities. Now it’s clear to me that longtermism offers a deeply impoverished view of our future, and that it could have catastrophic consequences if taken literally by those in power: preemptive violence, mass surveillance, thermonuclear war – all to “protect” and “preserve” our supposed “long-term potential” in the universe, to quote Ord again.
This is about yet another ideology that justifies its means for the supposed ends it will achieve.
From the article:
> Longtermism offered its own secular version of utopia, too: by reengineering ourselves, you and I might become immortal super-beings, and by spreading throughout the universe we could construct a multi-galactic utopian paradise of radical abundance, indefinite lifespans and endless happiness – a project that some leading longtermists quite literally call “paradise engineering”.
and
> However, the more I studied utopian movements that became violent, the more I was struck by two ingredients at the heart of such movements. The first was – of course – a utopian vision of the future, which believers see as containing infinite, or at least astronomical, amounts of value. The second was a broadly “utilitarian” mode of moral reasoning, which is to say the kind of means-ends reasoning above. The ends can sometimes justify the means, especially when the ends are a magical world full of immortal beings awash in “surpassing bliss and delight”, to quote Bostrom’s 2020 “Letter from Utopia”.
and...
> I have been inside the longtermist movement. I was a true believer. Longtermism was my religion after I gave up Christianity – it checked all the same boxes, except that for longtermists we must rely on ourselves to engineer paradise, rather than supernatural deities. Now it’s clear to me that longtermism offers a deeply impoverished view of our future, and that it could have catastrophic consequences if taken literally by those in power: preemptive violence, mass surveillance, thermonuclear war – all to “protect” and “preserve” our supposed “long-term potential” in the universe, to quote Ord again.
This is about yet another ideology that justifies its means for the supposed ends it will achieve.