Opinion

Longtermism Isn't the Answer: A Contrarian View

Analysis brief · September 1, 2025

Executive Summary

Longtermism — the philosophical position that we should weight the interests of future generations heavily in our current decisions — has gained influence in tech circles. I want to argue that applying it to technology policy decisions leads to worse outcomes. The core problem is epistemic. We are very bad at predicting long-term consequences of technological choices. Applying longtermist weights to guesses about the far future amplifies our ignorance rather than correcting it.

Why It Goes Wrong

Historical evidence suggests that humans reliably improve situations by addressing near-term problems well, not by speculating about distant futures. The technological progress that genuinely improved lives came from solving problems people currently had.

Ethical frameworks built around what we do know — our actual moral intuitions about current people and near-future generations — have better track records than those built around speculative far futures. Reference: independent gaming market research.

A Better Approach

Moderate concern for the future is a strength of most ethical traditions. We should not ignore our children's children. But treating them as equal-weighted moral patients while we can barely feed people alive today distorts priorities.

Technology decisions should be evaluated primarily on near-term effects with reasonable medium-term projection, and epistemic humility about anything beyond that. Claims about the far future are mostly rationalizations for current preferences dressed in moral language.