The Fantasy World of Longtermism
Longtermism is an idea circulating among some philosophers and their adepts that prioritizes our ethical duty to future generations over the present one. William MacAskill, a philosopher and associate professor at Lincoln College at Oxford, defines the term in his book What We Owe the Future as “the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time”. For longtermism, Homo sapiens’ history on Earth has been very short- the first pages of a long book –so our most important duty is to ensure that our species can surmount any problems that could seriously threaten the species’ long-term continuity.
According to longtermists, this continuity relies on a careful calculation of the possible risks threatening humanity, especially the ones we are facing right now. Their risk obsession has led them to define a special term: ‘existential risk’, defined as a risk with the potential to eliminate all humanity. A non-existential risk is one that though quite destructive, would still allow a sizable group to continue the path toward the ‘vast and glorious future’ that awaits us. This long future is necessary for the continuation of technological and AI progress that would help humans –products of natural evolution- to transform from a natural entity, into a genetically modified and bio-engineered wonder, a Posthuman.
The importance of AI in their minds has led them to consider the possible threat from a wayward or misused AI as the most important existential risk we are facing. A bit lower on the existential risk scale is the possibility of a nuclear Armageddon, followed by the threat of pandemics or biochemical warfare. Though climate change is not forgotten, it doesn’t reach the top list of priorities since they believe that the current mitigation strategies will end up working quite soon.
Long-term assessments of climate change as a serious and complex problem are quite alarming to people like me, a climate doomer who goes beyond the mainstream climate rhetoric. You would imagine that a philosophy dedicated to assessing the risks that humanity faces would look at real-world parameters objectively, without being swayed by the opinions of the status quo. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case — instead, their pronouncements are gradually becoming part of the general consensus.
For example, longtermism philosopher and professor at Oxford, Toby Ord, is a much-esteemed advisor at the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister’s Office, the UK Cabinet Office, and Government Office for Science. He has also recently contributed to a report from the United Nations Secretary-General that mentions longtermism. This means that longtermism beliefs are taken seriously by world authorities and are affecting world-making decisions, even if these institutions appear to prioritize climate change.
Orb is a trustee for the non-profit organization 80,000 hours, started in London as a part of the Center for Effective Altruism, created by another longtermist William MacAskill. Their belief in technology’s power to solve any problem has made many friends in the Silicon Valley community — Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel are some of their strongest supporters.
Toby Ord has calculated the risks that humanity is facing in his book “The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity”. Many of the ideas in this book have reinforced my qualms about the lackadaisical views of longtermism on the topic of climate change. For example, in one of his calculations, Orb has concluded that the existential risk posed by AI in this century is 1 in 10 while climate change is only about 1 in 1000!
This fear of AI has made longtermists prioritize the importance of the morality involved in the relations between humans and AI. MacAskill, Ord, and another longtermist, Nick Bostrom, head of the Future for Humanity Institute at Oxford, consider that the most important human duty at the moment is ensuring that AI is developed with the right ethical stance –avoiding any possible threat to humans.
Bostrom thinks that at present, humans’ dealings with AI resemble “children playing with a bomb”. He thinks that we are not very aware of the threats posed by an overzealous AI that could follow an algorithm to its extreme, without caring about the harm it could cause to humans. Another worry that keeps Bostrom awake at night is the big danger posed by anarchists, ill-intentioned elements in society, or rogue countries, who might hack AI to destroy humanity.
When I read about the ticking bomb idea, I can’t help but think that humanity is in effect playing with a bomb, but it is not AI — it is the ticking bomb of climate change, whose evidence is mounting every day –truly posing an existential risk to humans!
Let’s take a closer look at the ideas of longtermism about climate change that has led them to believe that even the worst-case scenarios of the climate crisis do not represent much of an existential risk.
The ‘small’ problem of CO2
To begin with, they admit that CO2 has a greenhouse effect that could cause a series of worrisome problems, but they see these as a short-term issue –something that could be solved in the first half of this century. This is why longtermist William MacAskill has recently asserted this:
“the carbon dioxide that we have emitted will be no problem to future generations because only a small fraction will remain there”.
Bostrom has a similar view about CO2 so he assures us that geoengineering will most likely reverse the problem by 2050 while Ord is certain that the emission reduction treaties combined with the increase in green energy have already made wonders, making the problem very easy to solve.
These beliefs merit a good dose of reality!
First, one thing is to cut a few emissions here and others there, and another one is considerably reducing the greenhouse concentrations in the atmosphere –the ones that really affect us! While humans are busy with their climate meetings and emissions accords, in the real world, all the greenhouse concentrations have continued rising steadily, impervious to humans’ pledges and green energy developments.
Second, CO2 is a very stable molecule that will stay in the atmosphere for 300 to 1,000 years, meaning that the present CO2 will not dissipate any time soon, as MacAskill thinks — it will remain there for a while, just like all the emissions from the fossil fuels that we still use. The industrial machinery, including AI, that our civilization relies on won’t be able to transition away from fossil fuels any time soon, given that they currently provide 80% of the total global energy.
This means that even if we stopped all fossil fuels now –let’s say by substituting 100 percent of them with green energy or by using incredibly potent carbon capture devices –it would still take a long time for our atmosphere to get rid of the excess CO2 that we have put there.
Runaway Warming Scenario
Another climate problem that worries Bostrom and Ord is the potential for feedback loops to lead to a “runaway warming scenario.” They recognize that this could result in a substantial release of methane and CO2 into the atmosphere, causing a rapid global temperature increase. In the worst-case scenario, they acknowledge that this could be classified as an “existential risk,” though they are confident that a sizeable human community would be able to readjust, continue technological advancement, and ultimately save the day.
They know that this catastrophe will cause a lot of suffering and death to a lot of people in the world but they consider this a “blip” in the long scheme of homo Sapiens' long projected stay on Earth. For dyed-in-the-wool longtermists, previous wars and plagues don’t mean much when compared to the uninterrupted continuation of humanity, and most importantly, technological progress.
In any case, their worry about the possibility of a climate runaway scenario makes a lot of sense, though unfortunately, they tend to see this as something that might happen in a vaguely-defined future. In reality, we have already reached that point some time ago, the greenhouse gas concentration in CO2 equivalence has continued rising, unbalancing the Earth, heating up the whole planet, and destabilizing Arctic and Antarctic areas.
This Earth’s imbalance has increased the global temperature unequally so that the Arctic, and now, Antarctica, have warmed much more than other areas of the world. This means that the ice loss is increasing every year, greatly reducing the albedo effect — the capacity of Earth to cool itself by reflecting energy into space. This ice thawing has entered a vicious cycle in which the less ice there is the more the surrounding area heats up, the more ice melts, and the more the Earth warms.
One of the most important examples involves the Arctic’s recent series of above-average winter temperatures which have proven catastrophic to the stability of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf — an area characterized by shallow seas and big methane reservoirs. Based on data, scientists have found that great quantities of deep methane are being released. (Data from https://climateranalyzer. org). This methane-releasing increase is also happening in Siberia’s permafrost and other polar areas.
Polar areas are not the only ones that can release big amounts of naturally-occurring methane. Wetlands around the world are teeming with methane-producing microbes which makes them the top natural methane source. Wetlands are very useful to show the type of feedback loop that longermists could worry about.
The Pacific Ocean pattern ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) can have three phases: neutral, El Niño, and La Niña. Due to the climate crisis, these latter modes have become more frequent and extreme. Their effects are felt all over the world, resulting in changes in rainfall distribution, and causing droughts and floods around the globe. For example, in 2021, the reigning La Niña pattern caused very extreme rains in East Africa, leading to flooding of the wetlands.
Several studies have shown that around that time, there were incredibly high methane emissions coming from the area. The reason is that over-flooded wetlands -not just in East Africa, but everywhere, are much higher methane emitters than those with normal water levels. The climate crisis, by creating unusual and extreme weather patterns is increasing methane emissions from what seems, very innocuous sources.
So despite the wishful thinking of longtermism, the feedback loops that lead to a runaway climate scenario are already in full gear and as a result, there is an imbalance of the entire atmospheric and oceanic system -the currents that create Earth’s climate. The imbalance of these currents is a problem of planetary dimensions that involves a myriad of variables, each full of ramifications. Such a large-scale complex system is quite impossible to reverse, it doesn’t matter how clever AI happens to be! In essence, the benign climate patterns that allowed civilization, have been replaced by a new set that is proving to be less benign.
Temperature
Longtermism knows that the result of extreme feedback loops will be a worrisome runaway temperature rise. Toby Ord, for example, considers that a 10 °C rise in Earth’s temperature will be quite catastrophic for many people, though not for everyone. Orb seems to imagine the Earth’s temperature rise as something very organized that will dutifully raise temperatures everywhere by 10 degrees. He has therefore concluded that a group of survivors could move to the poles or high altitudes like Tibet, and pursue a very civilized life while continuing the technological march that one day will make possible the arrival of the Posthuman.
Blinded by the mirage of a glorious Posthuman surrounded by unimaginable technology, Orb doesn’t understand that such a temperature rise would imply the destruction of most life on Earth, including humans. If there were any survivors, securing food and drink would be their priority while any activity conducive to technological progress would be the last thing on their minds. His ideas of an idyllic Tibetan or Alaskan civilized refuge where the best intellects would gather to continue technological progress are just a longtermist dream.
It is strange that Ord, advisor to many world institutions and governments who follow the temperature targets of the IPCC, dares to consider a 10°C temperature rise as something troublesome that would kill many people, but not enough to consider it as an existential risk. Nick Bostrom, on the other hand, has a strange criticism of the IPCC– he considers that the effort we have done with green technology and emission cutting is never counted in their temperature target scenarios and this has led him to conclude that temperature has no predictive value in the climate problem.
What is clear is that the predictable climate that we used to have is gone, and we have already entered a path of increasing climate unpredictability which will reduce each year the possibilities of agricultural success. Climate predictability started about 11,000 years ago allowing agriculture to flourish and population to grow. Before that, humans had tried agriculture but had repeatedly failed due to the reigning unpredictable climate. Longtermists would reply that though the Earth has a much bigger population, we also have a very developed technology, especially AI, which will find a way to continue feeding the world.
Some longtermists, such as Bill Gates, propose various solutions, believing, for example, that crops could be genetically modified to withstand droughts. However, they fail to consider that an increase in climate unpredictability will lead to unforeseen weather patterns each year, rendering genetically modified drought-resistant crops or similar GMOs useless. For example, Pakistan, a usually drought-suffering country, suddenly experienced the most epic flood in 2022.
As if troubled agriculture weren’t enough, we are also living in an increasingly toxic environmental catastrophe that is causing rapid ecosystem loss and unabated species extinction. We are at the top of the species pyramid and this, plus our technological progress, has made us feel very superior –almost apart from nature. In reality, we are still very well planted in the natural world so any ecosystem loss or species extinction, is inevitably linked to our species’ fate and therefore reduces our survival chances.
It is very strange that we are the only species that has managed to discover and explain the laws of the Universe, only to forget them when it is convenient. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have embarked on a fast energy transformation voyage without caring about the inevitable waste that it produces. Worse yet, a respected section of the population continues to dream of a future that will demand more energy and create more and more waste.
Longtermist philosophers seem to live in a bubble in which technology is the priority, while the complicated disturbance of the Earth’s systems caused by their precious technology, is completely ignored.
William MacAskill enthusiastically invites people join his ‘altruistic’ group and donate their time and part of their salary to the achievement of this
“…Future civilization that will be big”!
Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours organizations include climate change in their agenda, however, their projects are often distorted to fit the complete misunderstanding of the climate and environmental crisis that their leaders promote.
For example, MacAskill doesn’t even consider reducing plastic bag use to be worth it; he proudly states,
“if you stopped using plastic bags entirely you’d cut out 10kg CO2eq per year, which is only 0.4% of your total emissions.”
His focus on a few personal emission cuts here and there, not only misses the whole point of the climate reality but also the very important issue of the environmental damage that plastic continues causing and that affects all life, including humans.
Another problem with longtermism is that the climate risk is seen mostly through the economical lens, so their greatest climate fear is the possibility of prolonged economical and tech progress stagnation. This obsession with economical growth goes completely against the varied degrowth proposals that many people believe will help us. Degrowth is the minimal action we could take to try to delay the worst effects of climate change so it is quite strange that longtermism continues to propose eternal growth when their supposed aim is to reduce any possible risk to humanity.
I understand that our society is under the spell of fantastical technological progress and the ‘cool’, optimistic, and never-ending future portrayed in sci-fi movies. Longtermism advocates grew up at a time when Star Trek and the War of the Galaxies were given great applause so it is not surprising that ideas about going to faraway stars, planets, and galaxies -as longtermism proposes in a not-so-distant future — can get a lot of traction. It is an exciting dream but just a dream, a fantasy that is respected because it flatters our species and it has managed to permeate the mainstream culture and the thoughts of many world institutions.
Longtermism has a big element of Promethean hubris, similar to the Titan god who defied the gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity. In our case, the fire happened to be fossil fuels, which allowed rapid scientific and technological growth for almost 200 years, until we noticed that it had greatly unbalanced the Earth’s systems and polluted the environment. Prometheus’ punishment was to be tied up while an eagle ate his liver. Our punishment is not given by any god –it is given by the reality of the universe’s laws and our growing addiction to eternal economic growth and technological innovation, which prevent us from seeing reality.
Longtermism imagines that all this technological growth can continue thanks to increasing technological progress that they believe will someday do what is impossible: an abundance of totally clean energy. In the universe, this is impossible — even the most sophisticated AI could never transform energy to do work, without accumulating its corresponding waste in whatever form (emissions, mining slag, toxic and contaminated water, etc). We have already done a lot of damage in 200 years, what damage would we accumulate if we could continue similar technological progress for millennia? Ask Prometheus!
