The collapse of the crypotcurrency exchange FTX has is forcing a reckoning in the financial world, with calls intensifying to reign in and regulate these emerging technologies. It's also forcing a philosophical reckoning about the ideas that inspired their CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried. SBF is a major proponent and funder of Effective Altruism, a philosophical and political movement that told him he could 'earn-to-give.' Now, SBF and many in Effective Altruism have also embraced longtermism, a strand of extreme utilitarian thinking that tells us we should worry about the interests of future people -- trillions of future people, 1000s of years into the future, and in planets far away. We examine the complicated moral math of longtermism with Émile P. Torres, a former longtermist who is now one of the movement's sharpest apostates.
