What I find really encouraging about this (and nearly every criticism of longtermism) is that you don't seem to actually disagree with the conclusions of longtermism (i.e. at the margin, we should work more on AI safety/governance and engineered pandemics and nuclear risk and climate change), but only the philosophical/worldview motivations that longtermists use to reach those conclusions. For what it's worth, I think I agree with nearly everything you've said, but I still find myself very sympathetic to longtermists. For me, the crucial insight is that dangerous and transformative technologies are arriving incredibly rapidly and we should be much more cautious about this than we currently are.
Even from quite a short-outlook, poverty-focussed perspective, I think the biggest determinant of the global poverty and disease burden in 20 years will be the direction and pace of automation and technological development from now until then (assuming most changes in poverty/disease are correlated with GDP and that transformative AI is just around the corner, as experts seem to think https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.08579.pdf ). It's not immediately clear what to do about this, but I'm strongly in favour of people finding out!
What I find really encouraging about this (and nearly every criticism of longtermism) is that you don't seem to actually disagree with the conclusions of longtermism (i.e. at the margin, we should work more on AI safety/governance and engineered pandemics and nuclear risk and climate change), but only the philosophical/worldview motivations that longtermists use to reach those conclusions. For what it's worth, I think I agree with nearly everything you've said, but I still find myself very sympathetic to longtermists. For me, the crucial insight is that dangerous and transformative technologies are arriving incredibly rapidly and we should be much more cautious about this than we currently are.
Even from quite a short-outlook, poverty-focussed perspective, I think the biggest determinant of the global poverty and disease burden in 20 years will be the direction and pace of automation and technological development from now until then (assuming most changes in poverty/disease are correlated with GDP and that transformative AI is just around the corner, as experts seem to think https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.08579.pdf ). It's not immediately clear what to do about this, but I'm strongly in favour of people finding out!