Longtermism - are future humans more important than current humans?
When you look at that number, a lot of the current problems facing humanity starts seeming like mere ripples. For example, priorities like climate change, which may make things very bad for humanity in the short or even in a few hundred years, but may not be a complete existential risk, would be less worthy of investments than trying to prevent the rise of ali that can destroy all humanity
As a quick post script, I wanted to add one more link. This is to an article which is critical of the long termism movement. So in my original post, I have added a link to what long termism is all about from William McCaskill, who is one of the biggest proponents of it. And it's a really good article that gives you a good overview. But obviously it's coming from it's been very one sided from his perspective. This article might be the other extreme
Are we talking about humans on planet Earth or humans in the universe? Are we talking about how we relate one another to one another? Are we talking about biologically, psychologically, sociologically? How we're lagging far behind in our science? I mean, lagging far behind science and innovation, to put it in a nutshell, sort of phrase, cave people living in a technologically advanced world. There are things that we haven't caught up yet with
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
The other focus areas that they have, even AI, I think a lot of things about AI issues and worries about AI are overblown, but we don't know that. I mean, that's something still that is hotly debated on all sides and if they want to invest some time in researching and working on that, that's fine. I think that's, again, still a known issue. So I just want to kind of call that out
Thank you for that. I think I misunderstood something or at the very least, I'm confused. Maybe you can help me out. I mean, as you said, governments and other organizations are all aware of the potential or inevitability of the next pandemic as well as the impacts of ali and that these things need to be considered and planned for and so on. Right, and if that's the case, then I don't know what sets longtermism apart
Christina, I think you are precisely right that that's my biggest kind of criticism or question about longtermism as swell. That if most of the issues, practical issues, if you look at the BBC article, the things he does talk about are things like Pandemic Research and AI. And we know people are already working on that, right? So if you look at that perspective, those part of the marketing solve. So what is new here?
Aayan Banerjee
@BasTalk · 2:53
In fact, to look into the future, you probably have to go back into the past and you see what problems got solved faster, how many problems can you list which were thought way ahead of its time? And then eventually, when the right time came, somebody said, see, our three previous generations thought through this. It's never happened
This is like a big company investing in what might be long term successful R and D efforts for their company which might become something that will make the company survive in the long term. Whereas if they only focus on image at quarter to quarter sales, which most companies do all the time, they might keep on succeeding, but then at some point find themselves to be kind of obsolete, right, or completely somebody pulls the rack from under their business model. Right