Making humanity's long-term potential the overriding priority licenses imposing real costs on people who are alive today.

Their wordsThe problem with these grand ambitions—saving humanity from extinction and enabling our species to reach its full potential millions of years from now—is that they ostensibly justify any cost in the present.

Their wordsThe short answer is that elevating the fulfilment of humanity’s supposed potential above all else could nontrivially increase the probability that actual people – those alive today and in the near future – suffer extreme harms, even death.