Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

In this course

MacAskill is a key theorist of longtermism, the effective altruism-derived framework that prioritizes reducing existential risks to humanity's far future over addressing present-day problems—a philosophy that has become influential among AI researchers and tech billionaires. In the course readings, he appears primarily as the co-author of longtermism's foundational argument and as part of the broader TESCREAL ideological bundle that shapes how technologists, including those at companies like Anthropic, think about AI development and civilizational risk. His work matters to this seminar because longtermism provides the ethical scaffolding through which many AI researchers justify their focus on speculative future scenarios rather than immediate societal harms.

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…Influence and variants. The TESCREAL bundle of ideologies has become enormously influential, especially within certain powerful corners of the tech industry. Current and former billionaires who subscribe to, or are associated with, one or m…| | | | | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | | | 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 …

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Appears alongside

People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.