Longtermism better from a development skeptical stance?

By Benevolent_Rain @ 2024-12-09T12:16 (+16)

One thought that was inspired by some critics of development I talked to was that longtermism, and especially the more "conservative" types of longtermism, might be better from the point of view of people disillusioned with Western development interventions. I am not saying that this is a main consideration, or even true, but I was surprised to learn that people who are critical of the effectiveness of aid in the Global South was quite excited about western altruists and philanthropists focusing more on trying to limit the downsides of Western technological progress, compared to seeking to improve things in the Global South. 
 

By conservative longtermism I mainly mean efforts to exercise caution and creating guardrails when developing biotechnology and AI.

I am happy to expand on this as far as my lay knowledge of development criticism goes in the comments but thought worth posting as I have not seen this viewpoint emphasized in EA circles before.

Quickly, my naive understanding of developments critics is that it seems hard to point out significant progress driven my any Western intervention. I think this has in part been covered by some excellent guests on the 80k podcast (I think there was one with a development economist or similar who showed that development is much more about one or a handful of often non-Western events, such as the import of textiles skills from Korea to Bangladesh). I also understand that the most impressive story in development, the eradication of poverty in China, was largely achieved without much Western intervention.

On the other hand, one can argue that issues around climate change, e-waste and numerous other issues are problems created by technology in the West having negative externalities in the Global South.

Thus, work on trying as much as possible to make biotechnology and AI go well, look, as far as I can tell, to left leaning global development critics, to be much more robustly good pathways for impact. In my simple head it is something like "it is probably better to not cause problems in the first place, than to cause them and try desperately to fix it afterwards". Moreover, it also seems that another benefit of longtermist interventions is that they are done by Western altruists in the West, and thus any bad outcome is likely to affect them and they are also likely to be much more sensitive to context and the needs of people around them in their community.