Turning to long-termism

There has been little in our evolutionary history that really rewarded long-term thinking. We didn’t even know about big threats to our survival, like giant asteroid strikes, and, if we had known, there was nothing we could have done about them anyway.

'Civilization only began a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history,' wrote Oxford University philosopher Derek Parfit.

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

September 19, 2022

LONDON, U.K.—Which would be worse: a global nuclear war with all buttons pressed, or real, self-conscious artificial intelligence that goes rogue? You know, the central theme of the Terminator movies. An AI called Skynet wakes up and immediately realizes that humanity could simply switch it off a...

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