Longtermism – a threat to Africa’s development?

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.

Read more in Daily Maverick: “Moonshot thinking, science fiction prototyping can ignite a climate technology revolution”

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. 

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

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