It’s also why Carrick has attracted the financial support of cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam and his brother Gabe are heavily involved in anti-pandemic causes, and are influenced by philosophical views that I share. As Bitcoin looks like a useless bubble, and pandemic prevention is one of the things the world needs most, cryptocurrency money focusing the US government on pandemic prevention is trash becoming treasure. Of course, it looks like lots of other things to other people who have an understandable fear of cryptocurrency billionaires funding obscure causes.
I was gearing up to write a blog post explaining the situation, but Ian Ward at Politico did it for me. I strongly recommend it to anyone trying to figure out what’s going on here. The article even explained longtermism! (And now there's yet another good article on the matter – an interview of Carrick by Dylan Matthews and Miranda Dixon-Luinenberg.) This is one of the deep philosophical reasons why I’m so heavily focused on pandemic prevention. Ward does a good job, but I’ll briefly explain it in my own terms.
As COVID-19 showed, the world isn’t well-defended against pandemics. And with technology getting cheaper and more easily accessible, the ability to design your own highly transmissible lethal virus at home might soon be widely available too. There’s a serious risk that the human species ends soon after that point.
While it’s pretty important to prevent lots of people from dying, it’s extra important to prevent literally everyone from dying. That cuts off any possibility of a future where the human species makes massive technological and social progress, and achieves a stable high-tech peaceful society where everyone is happy. Obviously that’s a long way off, but if we get there in maybe a thousand years, the next millions of years could be loely. We could use our futuristic technology to enjoy ourselves, explore space, and make all the other earthly beings happy too. If you count value in bits of happiness as we utilitarians do, and you don’t care about when that happiness exists in time, creating that future looks like the most important thing to do.
That’s why preventing humanity from ending just as we acquires the technological power to destroy ourselves looms as the greatest task of our era. We survived nuclear threats in the Cold War. We’ll spend this century grappling with the threat of climate change, and while powerful forces block progress on that issue, there are also many powerful people who understand its seriousness and how to address it. On pandemics, we’re woefully underprepared. If money from the cryptocurrency bubble is going to defend humanity from destruction by killer viruses, so much the better.
