“Against Aschenbrenner: How ‘Situational Awareness’ constructs a narrative that undermines safety and threatens humanity” by Gideon Futerman

Summary/Introduction

Aschenbrenner's ‘Situational Awareness’ (Aschenbrenner, 2024) promotes a dangerous narrative of national securitisation. This narrative is not, despite what Aschenbrenner suggests, descriptive, but rather, it is performative, constructing a particular notion of security that makes the dangerous world Aschenbrenner describes more likely to happen.

This piece draws on the work of Nathan A. Sears (2023), who argues that the failure to sufficiently eliminate plausible existential threats throughout the 20th century emerges from a ‘national securitisation’ narrative winning out over a ‘humanity macrosecuritization narrative’. National securitisation privileges extraordinary measures to defend the nation, often centred around military force and logics of deterrence/balance of power and defence. Humanity macrosecuritization suggests the object of security is to defend all of humanity, not just the nation, and often invokes logics of collaboration, mutual restraint and constraints on sovereignty. Sears uses a number of examples to show that when issues are constructed as issues [...]

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Outline:

(03:08) Section 1- What is securitisation

(07:45) Section 2: Sears 2023 - The macrosecuritization of Existential Threats to humanity

(16:30) Section 3 - How does this relate to Aschenbrenner's 'Situational Awareness'?

(19:54) Section 4 - Why Aschenbrenners narrative is dangerous and the role of expert communities

(29:40) Section 5- The possibility of a moratorium, military conflict and collaboration

(36:56) Conclusion

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First published:
July 15th, 2024

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H6xEhur9Lbbv9dhBC/against-aschenbrenner-how-situational-awareness-constructs-a

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.