I take it to be a quasi-religious worldview that not only says you're ethically excused

from caring about the poorest people around the world, but also you're a better person

for focusing instead on the long term. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marx, and this week I have a fantastic conversation for you with Phil Torres.

Phil is a PhD candidate at Leibniz University in Hanover, Germany, and has a forthcoming book called

Human Extinction, A History of Thinking about the End of Humanity that will be published later this

year or early next. Phil has been writing a lot about this concept or ideology of long-termism

lately. And it's one that I think listeners of this show and people who are interested

in the tech industry should know more about because it is highly influential among people

in the upper echelons of the tech industry, the really powerful, incredibly rich people who

also have a lot of influence and power over society and the direction of our society in the future,

not to mention shaping our ideas of what that future should look like.

Among them are people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who have not only talked about being

associated with these movements, but have actually funded the kind of academic work that goes into legitimizing them, as well as people like Jeff Bezos.

And the issue here, as Phil and I talk about in this conversation, is that they are incredibly focused on the future of humanity, not just, you know, people in the next

hundred years or 200 years, but people who will be living thousands and millions of years from

now. And they consider that those lives have the same value as lives that exist today.

So realizing the kind of millions and billions of people that could live

in the future is then considered of much greater value than helping, you know, the few billion

people that exist on our planet today, unless helping those people helps to avert, you know,

an extinction event or an event that will stop the realization of this grand future,

of space colonization, of the merging of technology and humanity to create what they call

post-humans and the development of the technologies and the systems that will be necessary to

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