However, endorsing this view likely requires fairly speculative claims about how existing risks will nearly disappear after the time of perils has ended.
A note on this: the first people to study the notion of existential risk in an academic setting (Bostrom, Ord, Sandberg, etc.) explicitly state in their work many of those assumptions.
They chiefly revolve around the eventual creation of advanced AI which would enable the automation of both surveillance and manufacturing; the industrialization of outer space, and eventually the interstellar expansion of Earth-originated civilization.
In other words: they assume that both
The creation of safe AGI is feasible.
Extremely robust existential security will follow, conditional on (1.).
Proposed mechanisms for (2.) include interstellar expansion and automated surveillance.
Thus, the main crux on the value of working on longtermist interventions is the validity of assumptions (1.) and (2.). In my opinion, finding out how likely they are to be true or not is very important and quite neglected. I think that scrutinizing (2.). is both more neglected and more tractable than examining (1.), and I would love to see more work on it.
A note on this: the first people to study the notion of existential risk in an academic setting (Bostrom, Ord, Sandberg, etc.) explicitly state in their work many of those assumptions.
They chiefly revolve around the eventual creation of advanced AI which would enable the automation of both surveillance and manufacturing; the industrialization of outer space, and eventually the interstellar expansion of Earth-originated civilization.
In other words: they assume that both
The creation of safe AGI is feasible.
Extremely robust existential security will follow, conditional on (1.).
Proposed mechanisms for (2.) include interstellar expansion and automated surveillance.
Thus, the main crux on the value of working on longtermist interventions is the validity of assumptions (1.) and (2.). In my opinion, finding out how likely they are to be true or not is very important and quite neglected. I think that scrutinizing (2.). is both more neglected and more tractable than examining (1.), and I would love to see more work on it.