A small global elite, call them “Davos Man” if you wish, owns an increasing share of global income and wealth. The 2009 global financial crisis, the 2020 pandemic and the 2022 war in Ukraine have swelled their fortunes. They are wielding increasing power over international affairs. We live in a new (neo-) feudal economy, with the (tech) elite billionaires our new overlords, while the middle class is shrinking. The prospects for escaping poverty are gradually evaporating for most of the poor.

In this context, we should understand the recent prominence in the media of an offshoot of the effective altruism movement called Longtermism. Longtermism is the view that if we want to be maximally altruistic, we should serve the interest of the vast numbers of future people who may yet live. These may include possible sentient digital people. Any existential risk must be eliminated at all costs – even if it means neglecting current problems such as poverty and climate change.  

It is associated with many tech elite billionaires’ views and ambitions – Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Jaan Tallinn. As well as the recently disgraced – and arrested – CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, who gave millions to promote longtermism. Indeed, the enthusiasm with which our billionaire overlords embrace longtermism has led to it being described as “a disturbing secular religion that looks like it addresses humanity’s deepest problems, but actually justifies pursuing the social preferences of elites”. 

These social preferences may have nothing to do with current global challenges such as poverty, inequality, conflict, migration and even climate change – challenges that are acutely affecting Africa. In a now infamous paper, the founders of longtermism, Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill, recommended that “for the purposes of evaluating actions, we can in the first instance often simply ignore all the effects contained in the first 100 (or even 1,000) years, focusing primarily on the further-future effects” (they later deleted this). Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher and an intellectual father of longtermism, argues that “the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one-billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives”. 

This type of reasoning could lead some to assume that sacrificing a billion human lives now to achieve the existence of a trillion beings in the very far future is morally correct. It has been called “Pascalian fanaticism” as it succumbs to the faulty use of expected value maximisation known as Pascal’s Wager.

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Using this reasoning, Bostrom further argues that few things are as crucial as galactic expansion: “The potential for approximately 1038 human lives is lost every century that colonisation of our local supercluster is delayed.” This argument underlies the enthusiasm of the billionaire space race, including Musk’s launching of a Tesla Roadster into space. Longtermists have argued that not investing considerable sums in space exploration now (such as colonising Mars) is an “astronomical waste” of opportunity. 

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Even if longtermists could be dissuaded from sacrificing billions of humans now for the future good, they would still want to divert funds from current development aid. As one of its proponents declared, “saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal”. 

No wonder the response to this has been warnings to point out that  “longtermism could be a justification for some outright ghoulish behaviour. Should we put any regulatory limits on the new billionaire space race? A longtermist could easily conclude that any government standing in the way of Elon Musk’s interstellar ambitions is a moral abomination – directly harming the potential well-being of trillions of future humans.”

Elon Musk. (Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images for The Met Museum / Vogue)

One ghoulish project that longtermists would like to see more money being spent on is to develop an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that it can control – an AGI that is aligned with human interest. This will not only ensure that an AGI does not wipe out humanity and prevent all possible future generations from living, but it may fulfil the transhumanist wishes of the longtermists – to attain immortality. 

If the AGI cannot be created in their current lifetimes, then in future – if humanity’s very far future can be ensured – AGI may enable technological resurrection. An AGI may use simulation methods to “resurrect all possible people” who have ever lived. A super-intelligence may even use signals from advanced civilisations that lived in an aeon before the Big Bang, which they may have embedded in the universe’s cosmic background radiation to “reconstruct an entire previous aeon civilisation”.

Longtermism is not really about the future. It’s about something other than maximising social utility. Both the well-being of future generations and utilitarianism are old ideas. The Global Development Community has a strong tradition of emphasising inter- and intragenerational equality. Longtermism is really about fulfilling the transhumanist agenda of the worlds’ new billionaire overlords – the techno-feudalists. The one thing their billions of dollars cannot buy right now is immortality. Their bet is thus on the future to resurrect them – if only AI will play along. It is therefore not surprising that AI is being hyped to the extent that it is. Which is why Oxford philosopher Luciano Floridi is critical of the AI hype, saying “it is a rich-world preoccupation likely to worry people in wealthy societies who seem to forget the real evils oppressing humanity and our planet”.

Economists – and other scholars in the global development community – who are at the forefront of dealing with the real evils oppressing humanity and the planet, have so far been slow to react to the growing influence of longtermism. The time has come, however, for the global development community to provide the needed balance. One of the basic pillars in the development community has always been that if we care for the well-being of future generations then we must solve current development challenges and problems. As put by Robert Wright: “I have a question for longtermists: Are you sure that our failure to think long term is the problem? […] Here’s my radical thought: The biggest existential threat we face […] is that humans aren’t good enough at short-termism. If people were skilled short-termists – if they pursued short-term interests wisely – our long-term problems, including the existential ones, would be manageable.” 

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Back in 1995, economists Andrea Baranzini and Francois Bourguignon linked existential risk and societal risk aversion to levels of development. They illustrated, using a growth model, that concerns about existential risks and longtermism will be rich-country and rich tech-elites concerns. Which, as this article has pointed out, they indeed are. 

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund. (Photo: Marco Bello / Getty Images)

In sum, that longtermism poses a threat to the development of African countries is clear. The policy and research implications are also clear. First, longtermists’ thinking should be prevented from capturing policy formulation on the level of the United Nations or African Union – as indeed longtermists are aiming to do. Second, the need for effective policy to address the growing income and wealth gaps between the top 0,01% and the rest is becoming more urgent than ever. Countering growing inequality should include more urgent policy and civil action to resist government capture by powerful and rich entrepreneurs. Third, global development institutions and African governments should avoid  being caught up in the AI hype, including the hype about the World Economic Forum’s so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, and redouble efforts to expose and address “the real evils oppressing humanity and our planet”. DM

This article is partly based on the following IZA Discussion Paper: Naudé, W. (2022). The Future Economics of Artificial Intelligence: Mythical Agents, a Singleton and the Dark Forest, IZA Discussion Paper no. 15713. 

Wim Naudé is RWTH Aachen University, Germany ([email protected]) and Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Johannesburg.