Understanding “longtermism”: Why this suddenly influential philosophy is toxic
salon.com
salon.com
I mean, this should be a concern for any human, surely? Though perhaps not for the universe itself.
The article is just dripping with derision, at least some of it unwarranted, and most of it apparently un-researched, or just cherry-picked.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees every thousand years.
somehow i think wendell berry’s long-term thinking isn’t what’s being described here …
Digital, posthuman, galactic empire futures may or not happen. There may be serious practical bumps in the road. Digital existence seemed nice in some positive fiction works (like in Greg Egan's Permutation City) until I've read Lena ( https://qntm.org/lena ), and that assuming that it will be possible or desirable at all. The same goes with unseen possibilities that our current stage of development may not see as an idea, even our today's world with everyone connected with internet sharing their lives was something with little or no fiction covering it not so long into the past.
In the other hand, having no future not only erases those weird speculations that may not happens, but also the past, a tree falling in a desert forest doesn't make sound, after mankind is gone things will be as we never existed, all we did never happened.
Is this an accurate description of longtermism, or just Salon playing the internet media outrage game?
Presenting a contested implication of X as a fact about X is basically lying. For example, suppose I observe you advocating for solar panels in a city meeting. I know that solar panels are often manufactured by slaves in Xinjiang. Is it appropriate for me to describe you as an advocate for slavery in Xinjiang? Obviously not - that would be a lie.
The reason Salon doesn't write "universal human rights are a quasi-religious worldview, influenced by the bloodstained French revolution and the early 20th century communist movement" is because Salon actually likes human rights.
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.
The basic argument of a longtermist position is that, similar to how throughout history we extended the set of entities we give moral value to (some humans -> all humans -> all humans + non-human animals -> ...), we ought to further extend that set to include future (i.e. not yet born) humans.
I don't personally find the argument very convincing, but it's not as absurd on its face as Salon is trying to paint it.
I do find it interesting that most people don't object to the idea of thinking about what is best for your hypothetical grandchildren.
I agree, my objection to the serious (say, Bostrom's) version of the argument is exactly along that line. When we add new entities to our set of those worthy of moral consideration, we don't imply they should all be given equal value. In less abstract terms, it's perfectly consistent to hold the following two moral positions: "animals should not be mistreated gratuitously", and "it is morally permissible to eat meat"; this would amount to having an utility function where animals have some nonzero weight, but not enough weight to offset reasonable human desires.
Likewise, that averting existential risks should trump all other considerations would not only require that future humans have some nonzero moral value, but that their moral value ought to be high enough that everything else pales in comparison.
Something like "my concern with future humans decreases exponentially with time", like you propose, still leaves us with a "normal" position: "sure, we should care somewhat about the future of mankind, but not, like, above all else". Both the premise and the conclusion of this "boring" position seem much more reasonable to me.
The hits on Robin Hanson were particularly bad. If you didn't read further you would think they were advocating slavery on the basis of sex and race.