I have been invited by Long Now Boston to be a panelist on an event scheduled to take place at MIT next week on how we can be ‘good ancestors’ to the people who will live in the Boston/Cambridge area over the next 250 years.

In preparation for that upcoming event I re-read this great takedown of The Long Now Foundation and the philosophy of Longtermism by Dave Karpf. I agree with Karpf 100%.

So I hasten to point out that while Long Now Boston is a group inspired by some of the ideas espoused by the Long Now Foundation, it is not part of that Foundation; it is a separately incorporated group.

Karpf analyses the Longtermism/Effective Altruism focus on theoretical transhuman civilizations millennia in the future as a convenient reason for the wealthy & powerful people (mostly masculine people — what a surprise!) to not address any of the urgent problems facing billions of people who are alive today.

The Long Now Boston event in which I’ll be participating, contrariwise, is focused not on super-intelligent post-humans ages and ages hence wherever they might be throughout the galaxy, but on our much more immediate theoretical descendants, in eastern Massachusetts. I don’t know what the other panelists are going to say next week, but my contribution to the discussion will focus on our moral obligations to people now alive or to be born in the next 50 years.

Anyway, this (below) is a weapons-grade Karpf essay & I highly recommend it.