Highway to Hell: The Dystopian Fantasies of Tech Billionaires
In this episode, we chat with philosopher and historian Émile P. Torres about the dystopian fantasies of ecologically blind tech billionaires – transhumanists, longtermists, and effective altruists – of defying nature, transcending humanity, and colonizing the universe. Highlights of our conversation include:
how transhumanism is built on the idea of creating God-like AI to reengineer humanity to achieve immortality, sustain capitalist growth, and colonize space;
how the effective altruism’s utilitarian approach to philanthropy is not only blind to systemic change, social inequalities, and moral integrity, but it also perpetuates neoliberal ideology that further contributes to inequality and exploitation, e.g. Sam Bankman-Fried’s ‘Earn to Give’ fraud;
the intersection of capitalism, longtermism, and the proliferation of global catastrophic risks in the age of AI, and the ethical implications of unchecked technological progress and environmental destruction;
the stark differences between the indigenous long-term-thinking approach and the impoverished and hubristic longtermism philosophy put forward by William MacAskill and Nick Bostrom, which prioritizes the existence of trillions of future disembodied people living in computer simulations over the suffering of current day people and nonhumans;
their dangerous rhetoric around ‘depopulation panic’ based on the underestimation of environmental destruction and anthropocentrism, and how some people like Malcolm and Simone Collins are repopulating humanity with their own seemingly superior genetic material.