When asked in March by a user of Twitter, the platform now known as X, how many people could die to stop this happening, longtermist idealogue Eliezer Yudkowsky replied that there only needed to be enough people “to form a viable reproductive population”.
“So long as that’s true, there’s still a chance of reaching the stars someday,” he wrote, though he later deleted the message.
EUGENICS CLAIMS
Longtermism grew out of work done by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in the 1990s and 2000s around existential risk and transhumanism – the idea that humans can be augmented by technology.
Academic Timnit Gebru has pointed out that transhumanism was linked to eugenics from the start.
British biologist Julian Huxley, who coined the term transhumanism, was also president of the British Eugenics Society in the 1950s and 1960s.
“Longtermism is eugenics under a different name,” Gebru wrote on X last year.
Bostrom has long faced accusations of supporting eugenics after he listed as an existential risk “dysgenic pressures”, essentially less-intelligent people procreating faster than their smarter peers.
The philosopher, who runs the Future of Life Institute at the University of Oxford, apologised in January after admitting he had written racist posts on an internet forum in the 1990s.
“Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood,” he wrote in his apology, pointing out it had been used to justify “some of the most horrific atrocities of the last century”.
“MORE SENSATIONAL”
Despite these troubles, longtermists like Yudkowsky, a high school dropout known for writing Harry Potter fan-fiction and promoting polyamory, continue to be feted.
Altman has credited him with getting OpenAI funded and suggested in February he deserved a Nobel peace prize.
But Gebru, Torres and many others are trying to refocus on harms like theft of artists’ work, bias and concentration of wealth in the hands of a few corporations.
Torres, who uses the pronoun they, said while there were true believers like Yudkowsky, much of the debate around extinction was motivated by profit.
“Talking about human extinction, about a genuine apocalyptic event in which everybody dies, is just so much more sensational and captivating than Kenyan workers getting paid US$1.32 an hour, or artists and writers being exploited,” they said.