Item — HN Reader

I've no idea how legit, or popular, this notion of longtermism is.

But it sounds like a great excuse to ignore almost all of the world's current or "in our lifetimes" problems, focus on a few very theoretical problems - of serious interest to only a few SciFi fans and longtermists - and proclaim it a virtue to do that. (While probably doing nothing whatever about any problem, beyond talking big and puffing themselves up.)

1 comments

A number of credible people think that AI safety may be an 'in our lifetimes' problem, and serious work is being done to get it right. This is the kind of thing a longtermist would support, because getting AI safety wrong could have terrible consequences for the future of life.

>and serious work is being done to get it right

Like what?

Well nobody can dispute that OpenAI is doing serious work, although whether selling API access to the text output of a neural network is actually using the philanthropic dollars invested to save humanity is another question. Also, the research institute whose most notable output is Harry Potter fanfic did write quite good fanfic!