Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

In this course

Ord is a key figure in longtermism, the philosophical position that maximizing value in the distant future should be a primary ethical concern, which the course readings invoke to frame debates about AI's existential stakes. His work enables arguments about why current AI development decisions matter catastrophically—the readings use longtermist reasoning to justify intense focus on AGI safety and resource allocation toward preventing worst-case scenarios rather than near-term applications. This framing sits in tension with the course's broader examination of how AI systems are actually embedded in present power structures and environmental costs, making Ord's theory a useful philosophical anchor for understanding why technologists and effective altruists prioritize certain AI risks over others.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres

The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence

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Longtermism was born when EAs reasoned: If our aim is to do the most good possible, and if the future could contain astronomical amounts of “value,” then we should focus on the far future rather than the present (Greaves and MacAskill, 2019…| | | | | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | | | our current understanding and imagination” (Goertzel, 2010). | | | Rationalism | An ideology that emerged from the LessWrong website, founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2009. Rationalists focus on …The AGI race fueled by the TESCREAList goal to build “transhuman minds” (Goertzel, 2010) and bring about “unlimited intelligence” has also resulted in systems that consume more and more resources in terms of data and compute power. This lea…

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