Event

Abstract: "Narratives on Artificial Intelligence (AI) have always been tied to around apocalyptic conceptions of salvation and doom for humanity. In recent years, these motifs have found a philosophical footing in a strand of though popular among technology elites, known as Longtermism. The premise of Longtermism is that humanity’s full potential can be realized and transcended – likely in the far future – by placing a wager on advances in digital technology, and specifically AI. As an ideational scaffold, it provides the moral rationale for unfettered investment in future-oriented technological promises, which bestows those realising the respective technologies for this future with extraordinary power. Longtermism combines a technological-rational approach to reasoning with Judeo-Christian tropes of eschatology to form a potent justification for this shift of power toward technology elites. This article examines the intellectual foundations of Longtermism as mode of reasoning and as a manifestation of eschatological anxieties and fantasies and argues that Longtermism and related visions of apocalyptic AI blend hyper-rational techno-logics with remixed Judeo-Christian religious and eschatological tropes, to produce a new configuration of faith that enrols our collective social, political and ethical future into a high-stakes wager on AI."

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