Power-hungry robots, space colonization, cyborgs: inside the bizarre world of 'longtermism'

Most of us don't think of power-hungry killer robots as an imminent threat to humanity, especially when poverty and the climate crisis are already ravaging the Earth. This wasn't the case for Sam Bankman-Fried and his followers, powerful actors who have embraced a school of thought within the effective altruism movement called "longtermism". In February, the Future Fund, a philanthropic organization endowed by the now-disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur, announced that it would be disbursing more than $100m – and possibly up to $1bn – this year on projects to "improve humanity's long-term prospects". The slightly cryptic reference might have been a bit puzzling to those who think of philanthropy as funding homelessness charities and medical NGOs in the developing world. In fact, the Future Fund's particular areas of interest include artificial intelligence, biological weapons and "space governance", a mysterious term referring to settling humans in space as a potential "watershed moment in human history".