William MacAskill.  What We Owe The Future: A Million Year View (2022)

Book Review

Will MacAskill’s ‘What We Owe The Future’ is my favourite book of 2022.  It is important, fascinating and a great read.

MacAskill is a youthful Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University.  He was a founder of the Effective Altruism Movement, ‘a global network of people who care deeply about the world, make helping others a significant part of their lives, and use evidence and reason to figure out how best to do so.’  The movement started in 2009 to encourage donations to demonstrably effective global health charities, but has grown into a community with tens of billions of dollars of pledged funds, tens of thousands of supporters and which researches and works on a wide range of cause areas.

A growing strand in Effective Altruism is ‘Longtermism’, the idea that positively influencing the future is a key moral priority of our time.   In this book MacAskill sets out the case for Longtermism and discusses some of its implications.

The book has been written to be accessible and compelling for the general reader as well as being a resource for Effective Altruists.  Hundreds of people helped with researching, editing and checking, which has created a top quality product.  There are extensive notes, but these are placed at the back of the book to avoid interrupting the flow of the text.  And this text is very engaging – tightly written, yet still with the author’s distinctive voice.

The book’s central point is to argue for a change in perspective to appreciate that humanity may have a big future.  The book opens with a thought experiment: ‘Imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived ….  But now imagine that you live all future lives …. Your life, we hope, would be just beginning …. We are like a teenager who might accidentally cause her own death in the next few months but also might live for a thousand years.’

MacAskill believes that the case for longtermism can be made from three simple premises: future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better. But he sees that taking longtermism seriously amounts to a moral revolution, extending the circle of concern to the ignored silent billions of future people.

MacAskill thinks we can influence the future in two main ways.  We can try to increase the scale of the future by reducing the risk of mass destruction.  And we can try to improve the quality of the future, particularly through positive moral change. So, our priorities should be reducing existential risks and improving morality.

MacAskill considers that moral values have extreme significance but are contingent.  He argues that for example the abolition of slavery depended on moral advocacy. ‘Positive moral change is not inevitable – it’s the result of long, hard work by generations of thinkers and activists.’  He believes we are currently at a time of plasticity, where values can change, but that values may soon come to be locked-in, as Artificial Intelligence may allow despots to control ideas.  He wants a morally exploratory world where values can continue to improve. 

Longtermism relies on the assumption that it is of positive value to bring into existence people who will have good lives.  To review this assumption, the book explains the debates in population ethics that started with philosopher Derek Parfit.  MacAskill shows that paradoxes arise if we are neutral about creating happy people, and concludes that the existence of people with positive welfare is valuable.

Another challenge to longtermism would be if the future were expected to be bad.  This is addressed by summarising evidence on whether people currently are happy and concludes that on balance people have positive welfare now and that this is likely to improve. 

The book closes with a discussion of how to take action. MacAskill believes that for the individual, donations are more impactful than changing personal consumption.  And the conclusion is that with existential risks and moral progress as priorities, ‘this is a time when we can be pivotal in steering the future onto a better trajectory.’

Further Resources

The book at Amazon Uk

I enjoyed the Audiobook read by the author in his softened Scottish accent.

The book’s supporting website: https://whatweowethefuture.com

Effective Altruism: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org

My list of podcast appearances and articles promoting the book https://jamesaitchison.co.uk/?p=1583. 

My notes on Doing Good Better,  William MacAskill’s previous book.

My notes on The Precipice, the complimentary book by Toby Ord on extinction risk.

In a paragraph

The book argues for Longtermism, the view that positively influencing the future is a key moral priority of our time.  Future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better.  We should both try to ensure survival and to improve future lives. We are at a time of plasticity where moral progress is possible before values become locked-in.

Key points

• Imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived. But now imagine that you live all future lives. Your life, we hope, would be just beginning. The future is big.

• Longtermism is the idea that positively influencing the future is a key moral priority of our time.

• Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better. This is the case for longtermism in a nutshell. The premises are simple, yet taking them seriously amounts to a moral revolution.

• We are like a teenager who might accidentally cause her own death in the next few months but also might live for a thousand years.

• Though the future could be wonderful, it could also be terrible.

• The present era is extremely unusual compared to both the past and the future – our rapid rate of change cannot continue forever. This gives us an outsized opportunity to positively influence the future. A moment of plasticity.

• We can assess the value of changing future states by significance, persistence and contingency.

• We can impact the longterm future by ensuring survival (duration) and by improving average value (trajectory). Ensuring survival is justified as the existence of happy people is valuable and lives are likely to be positive.

• Expected value theory is crucial whenever we have to take a bet, to make a decision in the face of uncertainty. Buildering was hugely foolish because dying wasn’t sufficiently unlikely. That we don’t know how bad climate change may be gives us more reason to worry.

• Slavery abolition was contingent. Started with Quaker Benjamin Lay. Abolitionists persuaded the British government to take costly actions.  The contingency of moral norms is high enough that the value of ensuring that the world is on the right track, morally, is enormously high.  We should aspire to be moral weirdos like Benjamin Lay.

• Values can persist. Technology could radically alter the dynamic of moral change and give value lock-in.  Build a morally exploratory world.

• Extinction risks include asteroids, engineered pathogens, great power war.

• If some step in our evolutionary history was extremely improbable, there might be no other highly intelligent life elsewhere in the affectable universe, giving us cosmic significance.

• Recovery from catastrophe may be possible. Fossil fuels retention helpful.

• We may be about to enter an unsustainable state with high existential risk. We need to get beyond this and develop technologies to defend against these risks.

• Since 1970 the pace of economic growth seems to have slowed.Fewer low-hanging fruit. Slowing population growth.

• Population Ethics. Derek Parfit.The Intuition of Neutrality.  The Fragility of Identity.  The Average View.  The Total View. Repugnant Conclusion. Critical Level View.  Moral Uncertainty. Benefits of Having Children.

• If you lived through every life up until today, would you think that your life has been good, on balance?When you look to the future, is it with a sense of optimism or dread? Imagine that you live through the lives of all sentient creatures. Your life as a human being would amount to only one–hundred billionth of your time on Earth.

• The more optimistic we are, the more important it is to avoid permanent collapse or extinction; the less optimistic we are, the stronger the case for focusing instead on improving values or other trajectory changes.

• Parfit: Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine.

• Is human life positive? Evidence from life satisfaction surveys, asking whether happy, experience sampling, skipping. Perhaps 10% of lives are below neutral, but perhaps 40% of experiences would be skipped. Is life getting better? Yes, Easterlin paradox doesn’t exist.

• Nonhuman animals. Weighing by neurons reduces importance.  Wild fish most numerous.  ‘If we assess the lives of wild animals as being worse than nothing on average, which I think is plausible (though uncertain), then we may conclude that for wild animals, the growth of Homo sapiens has been a good thing.’

• How you evaluate non-wellbeing goods depends on the weight you put on “bads,” like destruction of the environment, and on “goods,” like democracy and scientific progress.

• Morality intuitively considers suffering more important than happiness. [But we also may value just being alive.]

• The key argument for optimism about the future concerns an asymmetry in the motivation of future people — namely, people sometimes produce good things just because the things are good, but people rarely produce bad things just because they are bad. [But entropy.] Although they are rare in the population as a whole, malevolent, sadistic, or psychopathic actors may be disproportionately likely to gain political power.

• The badness of anti-eutopia is greater than the goodness of eutopia, but eutopia is much more likely than anti-eutopia.

• Take robustly good actions, build up options, and learn more. Donations are more impactful than changing personal consumption. Whatever else you do in life, donations are one way to do an enormous amount of good. Political activism, spreading good ideas, and having children are also impactful. Even if there is a small chance of success, the expected value of focusing on upside options can be great.

• A movement of morally motivated people, concerned about the whole scope of the future. Positive moral change is not inevitable. It’s the result of long, hard work by generations of thinkers and activists.  This is a time when we can be pivotal in steering the future onto a better trajectory.

Comments

This book is a great achievement.  It was a team effort, yet it has remained personal.  It is very readable.  It is full of fine phrases but is accurate and clear.  It has a well-signposted logical structure.  It has extensive notes, but these are segregated as end notes to maintain the flow of the text.  It can be used as a study resource for Effective Altruists but is accessible to the general reader.  The promotion of the book has also been excellent, including numerous high-quality podcast appearances and articles.

The main theme is moral circle expansion.  This book is aiming to be to Long-Termism what Animal Liberation was to anti-speciesism.

This theme is introduced by a beautifully presented thought experiment at the start of the book – imagine living through all lives that have lived and then through all future lives.  The thought experiment is later extended to non-human animals and then to the question of whether lives are good or bad overall.  It is a very effective way of presenting the utilitarian view that all conscious lives should be aggregated.  Yet, from a philosophically sophisticated perspective the thought experiment is problematic as the mind does not have an underlying subject that could move from life to life.  That we accept the thought experiment shows the strength of our dualist intuitions about the mind.

The most distinctive aspect of the book’s approach to longtermism is its emphasis on values.  MacAskill makes a strong case that moral values are critical for welfare, but that moral progress is contingent on thinking and activism.  He thinks we live at an unusual time of fast growth where our values are plastic: the values adopted now may endure as AI may cause values to be locked in.  I endorse this perspective.     

MacAskill seems to have consciously decided to keep his presentation of longtermism inclusive by concentrating on commonsensical arguments that are likely to be generally accepted.  This may be justified as near-term extinction and totalitarian risks are sufficiently big and easily appreciated that they make his case, making Sci-Fi arguments about human improvement and artificial intelligence superfluous.  I think this was an intelligent approach as any suggestion of far-out arguments have been held again MacAskill by some commentators. Such criticisms seem particularly unfair when MacAskill is responding to weird thought experiments produced by critics of utilitarianism.

MacAskill defends ‘Weak Longtermism,’ the view that the longterm is a key moral priority, rather than ‘Strong Longtermism,’ the view that the longterm is the overwhelming priority. This has the benefits of being inclusive and of avoiding undermining EA’s neartermist work.

The book has a chapter on Existential Risks, but this is less comprehensive than the treatment in Toby Ord’s The Precipice.  In a further chapter, MacAskill suggests that humanity is likely to be able to recover from many catastrophes – he may be right, but I wonder if such thinking risks making us less careful about avoiding catastrophes.  

MacAskill also includes a chapter on the risk of economic stagnation.  His particular angle is that economic growth is needed to tackle existential risk, but this chapter seems somewhat peripheral to his main arguments.

It is notable that the book makes expert use of  history, economics and many other disciplines to make its case.  MacAskill is a philosopher, but the book is much broader, and perhaps of all the disciplines history is the most central.   The book draws on several distinctive Effective Altruist ways of thinking and should contribute to spreading these ideas more widely.  EA ideas used include Effective Value Theory, Progress Studies, human biases and historical progress.   

BOOK EXTRACTS AND NOTES

Part I. The Long View

Introduction

Imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived. Your first life begins about three hundred thousand years ago in Africa.  After living that life and dying, you travel back in time and are reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first. Once that second person dies, you are reincarnated as the third person, then the fourth, and so on. One hundred billion lives later, you become the youngest person alive today. 

Your experience of history is very different from what is depicted in most textbooks. Famous figures like Cleopatra or Napoleon account for a tiny fraction of your experience. The substance of your life is instead composed of ordinary lives, filled with everyday realities — eating, working, and socialising; laughing, worrying, and praying.

Your life lasts for almost four trillion years in total. For a tenth of that time, you’re a hunter-gatherer, and for 60 percent you’re an agriculturalist. You spend a full 20 percent of your life raising children, a further 20 percent farming, and almost 2 percent taking part in religious rituals. For over 1 percent of your life you are afflicted with malaria or smallpox. You spend 1.5 billion years having sex and 250 million giving birth. You drink forty-four trillion cups of coffee.

You experience cruelty and kindness from both sides. As a colonizer, you invade new lands; as the colonized, you suffer your lands taken from you. You feel the rage of the abuser and the pain of the abused. For about 10 percent of your life you are a slaveholder; for about the same length of time, you are enslaved.

You experience, firsthand, just how unusual the modern era is. Because of dramatic population growth, a full third of your life comes after AD 1200 and a quarter after 1750. At that point, technology and society begin to change far faster than ever before. You invent steam engines, factories, and electricity. You live through revolutions in science, the most deadly wars in history, and dramatic environmental destruction. Each life lasts longer, and you enjoy luxuries that you could not sample even in your past lives as kings and queens. You spend 150 years in space and one week walking on the moon. Fifteen percent of your experience is of people alive today.

That’s your life so far — from the birth of Homo sapiens until the present. But now imagine that you live all future lives, too. Your life, we hope, would be just beginning. Even if humanity lasts only as long as the typical mammalian species (one million years), and even if the world population falls to a tenth of its current size, 99.5 percent of your life would still be ahead of you.  On the scale of a typical human life, you in the present would be just five months old. And if humanity survived longer than a typical mammalian species — for the hundreds of millions of years remaining until the earth is no longer habitable, or the tens of trillions remaining until the last stars burn out — your four trillion years of life would be like the first blinking seconds out of the womb. The future is big.

If you knew you were going to live all these future lives, what would you hope we do in the present? How much carbon dioxide would you want us to emit into the atmosphere? How much would you want us to invest in research and education? How careful would you want us to be with new technologies that could destroy or permanently derail your future? How much attention would you want us to give to the impact of today’s actions on the long term?

I present this thought experiment because morality, in central part, is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own. When we do this at the full scale of human history, the future — where almost everyone lives and where almost all potential for joy and misery lies — comes to the fore.

This book is about longtermism : the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time. Longtermism is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it. If humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span, then, strange as it may seem, we are the ancients: we live at the very beginning of history, in the most distant past. What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people. We need to act wisely.

It took me a long time to come around to longtermism . It’s hard for an abstract ideal, focused on generations of people whom we will never meet, to motivate us as more salient problems.  [Neartermist] activities had a tangible impact. By contrast, the thought of trying to improve the lives of unknown future people initially left me cold. Sci-fi-seeming speculations about what might or might not impact the future seemed like a distraction.

But the arguments for longtermism exerted a persistent force on my mind.  These arguments were based on simple ideas: that, impartially considered, future people should count for no less, morally, than the present generation; that there may be a huge number of future people; that life, for them, could be extraordinarily good or inordinately bad; and that we really can make a difference to the world they inhabit.

As I learned more about the potentially history-shaping events that could occur in the near future, I took more seriously the idea that we might soon be approaching a critical juncture in the human story. Technological development is creating new threats and opportunities for humanity, putting the lives of future generations on the line.

I now believe the world’s long-run fate depends in part on the choices we make in our lifetimes. The future could be wonderful: we could create a flourishing and long-lasting society, where everyone’s lives are better than the very best lives today. Or the future could be terrible, falling to authoritarians who use surveillance and AI to lock in their ideology for all time, or even to AI systems that seek to gain power rather than promote a thriving society. Or there could be no future at all: we could kill ourselves off with biological weapons or wage an all-out nuclear war that causes civilisation to collapse and never recover.

There are things we can do to steer the future onto a better course. We can increase the chance of a wonderful future by improving the values that guide society and by carefully navigating the development of AI. We can ensure we get a future at all by preventing the creation or use of new weapons of mass destruction and by maintaining peace between the world’s great powers.

The Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University, and the Forethought Foundation.

I rely on three primary metaphors throughout. The first is of humanity as an imprudent teenager. The second is of history as molten glass.  The third metaphor is of the path towards longterm impact as a risky expedition into uncharted terrain.

This book’s scope is broad. Not only am I arguing for longtermism; I’m also trying to work out its implications. I’ve therefore relied heavily on an extensive team of consultants and research assistants. Whenever I’ve stepped outside of moral philosophy, my area of expertise, domain experts have advised me from start to end. This book is therefore not really “mine”: it has been a team effort. In total, this book represents over a decade’s worth of full-time work, almost two years of which was spent fact-checking.

I believe we have only scratched the surface of longtermism and its implications; there is much still to learn.

If I’m right, then we face a huge responsibility. Relative to everyone who could come after us, we are a tiny minority. Yet we hold the entire future in our hands. Everyday ethics rarely grapples with such a scale. We need to build a moral worldview that takes seriously what’s at stake.  By choosing wisely, we can be pivotal in putting humanity on the right course. And if we do, our great-great-grandchildren will look back and thank us, knowing that we did everything we could to give them a world that is just and beautiful.

Chapter 1: The Case for Longtermism

The Silent Billions 

Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better. This is the case for longtermism in a nutshell. The premises are simple, and I don’t think they’re particularly controversial. Yet taking them seriously amounts to a moral revolution.

Future people count 

Future people count, but we rarely count them.  The idea that future people count is common sense. Future people, after all, are people. They will exist. They will have hopes and joys and pains and regrets, just like the rest of us. They just don’t exist yet.Suppose that, while hiking, I drop a glass bottle on the trail and it shatters.  Harm is harm, whenever it occurs. Does the value of their joy disappear if they live in the future? 

Imagine what future people would think, looking back at us debating such questions. They would see some of us arguing that future people don’t matter. But they look down at their hands; they look around at their lives. What is different? 

Distance in time is like distance in space. Just as the world does not stop at our doorstep or our country’s borders, neither does it stop with our generation, or the next.

A society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.

Are there reasons to care more about people alive today?  Two reasons stand out to me. The first is partiality.  The second reason is reciprocity.  I’m just claiming that future people matter significantly.

The future is like Atlantis. It, too, is a vast, undiscovered country; and whether that country thrives or falters depends, in significant part, on what we do today.

The Future Is Big

Consider the long-run history of humanity. There have been members of the genus Homo on Earth for over 2.5 million years.  Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved around three hundred thousand years ago. Agriculture started just twelve thousand years ago, the first cities formed only six thousand years ago, the industrial era began around 250 years ago, and all the changes that have happened since then — transitioning from horse-drawn carts to space travel, leeches to heart transplants, mechanical calculators to supercomputers — occurred over the course of just three human lifetimes.

To illustrate the potential scale of the future, suppose that we only last as long as the typical mammalian species — that is, around one million years.  Also assume that our population continues at its current siz . In that case , there would be eighty trillion people yet to come; future people would outnumber us ten thousand to one .

Unlike other mammals , we have sophisticated tools that help us adapt to varied environments; abstract reasoning, which allows us to make complex, long-term plans in response to novel circumstances; and a shared culture that allows us to function in groups of millions. These help us avoid threats of extinction that other mammals can’t.  This has an asymmetric impact on humanity’s life expectancy. The real possibility that civilisation will last such a long time gives humanity an enormous life expectancy.

If the future population is bigger, it could be much bigger.  Look at the following diagram. Each figure represents ten billion people. So far, roughly one hundred billion people have ever lived. These past people are represented as ten figures. The present generation consists of almost eight billion people, which I’ll round up to ten billion and represent with a single figure.  The full version would fill twenty thousand pages.

 We are more like a teenager who might accidentally cause her own death in the next few months but also might live for a thousand years.

The Value of the Future

The future could be very big. It could also be very good — or very bad.

To get a sense of how good, we can look at some of the progress humanity has made over the last few centuries. Two hundred years ago, average life expectancy was less than thirty; today, it is seventy-three.  Back then, over 80 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty; now, less than 10 percent does. Back then, only about 10 percent of adults could read; today, more than 85 percent can.

Collectively we have the power both to encourage these positive trends and to change course on the negative trends, like the dramatic increases in carbon dioxide emissions and in the number of animals suffering in factory farms. We can build a world where everyone lives like the happiest people in the most well-off countries today, a world where no one lives in poverty, no one lacks adequate medical care, and, insofar as is possible, everyone is free to live as they want.

But we could do even better still — far better. The best that we have seen so far is a poor guide to what is possible.  Consider the life of a rich man in Britain in 1700. 

It’s not just technology that has improved people’s lives; moral change has done so, too.

Much of the progress we’ve made since 1700 would have been very difficult for people back then to anticipate. And that’s with only a three-century gap. Humanity could last for millions of centuries on Earth alone. On such a scale, if we anchor our sense of humanity’s potential to a fixed-up version of our present world, we risk dramatically underestimating just how good life in the future could be.

Consider the very best moments in your life — moments of joy, beauty, and energy, like falling in love, or achieving a lifelong goal, or having some creative insight. These moments provide proof of what is possible: we know that life can be at least as good as it is then. But they also show us a direction in which our lives can move, leading somewhere we have yet to go.

I’m not claiming that a wonderful future is likely. Etymologically, “utopia” means “no-place,” a better word would be “eutopia,” meaning “good place.”  And though the future could be wonderful, it could also be terrible.  Just as eutopia is a real possibility , so is dystopia. The future could be one where a single totalitarian regime controls the world, or where today’s quality of life is but a distant memory of a former Golden Age, or where a third world war has led to the complete destruction of civilisation.

Not Just Climate Change

My aim with this book is to stimulate further work in this area, not to be definitive in any conclusions about what we should do.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18.  Horace. 

Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War. 2017 book Destined for War, by political scientist Graham Allison, had the subtitle Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

Benjamin Franklin investments.

We can positively steer the future while improving the present, too.

Even in the European Union, which in global terms is comparatively unpolluted, air pollution from fossil fuels causes the average citizen to lose a whole year of life. By making energy cheaper, clean energy innovation improves living standards in poorer countries. By helping keep fossil fuels in the ground, it guards against the risk of unrecovered collapse. By furthering technological progress , it reduces the risk of longterm stagnation. A win – win – win – win – win.

Decarbonisation is a proof of concept for longtermism. Clean energy innovation is so robustly good, and there is so much still to do in that area that I see it as a baseline longtermist activity against which other potential actions can be compared.

The rest of this book tries to give a systematic treatment of the ways in which we can positively influence the longterm future, suggesting that moral change, wisely governing the ascent of artificial intelligence, preventing engineered pandemics, and averting technological stagnation are all at least as important, and often radically more neglected.

Our Moment in History

We live in an era that involves an extraordinary amount of change. To see this, consider the rate of global economic growth, which in recent decades averaged around 3 percent per year. This is historically unprecedented. For the first 290,000 years of humanity’s existence, global growth was close to 0 percent per year; in the agricultural era that increased to around 0.1 percent, and it accelerated from there after the Industrial Revolution.

The present era is extremely unusual compared to the past. But it’s also unusual compared to the future. This rapid rate of change cannot continue forever.  We are living through an extraordinary chapter in humanity’s story. We’re also unusually connected. The fact that our time is so unusual gives us an outsized opportunity to make a difference. Few people who ever live will have as much power to positively influence the future as we do.  We are out of equilibrium. A small push can affect in which direction we roll and where we come to rest.

Chapter 2: You Can Shape the Course of History

Prehistory’s Impact on Today 

Megafauna.  Homo sapiens are not only implicated in the extinction of giant sloths and canines: we are also the prime suspect in the end of our human cousins.

A Framework for Thinking About the Future

We can assess the longterm value of a new state of affairs in terms of three factors: its significance, its persistence, and its contingency.  Significance is the average value added by bringing about a certain state of affairs. Contingency is about noninevitability.  If something is very contingent, then that change would not have otherwise occurred. Multiplying significance, persistence, and contingency together gives us the longterm value of bringing about some state of affairs.

I was reckless as a teenager and sometimes went “ buildering.”  If I had not studied philosophy at school, and if I hadn’t had such an engaged and passionate teacher.

Two main ways in which we can impact the longterm future. First, we can affect humanity’s duration, to ensure civilisation’s survival.  Second, we can affect civilisation’s average value, change trajectory.  These two ideas structure the book. Part II of this book looks at trajectory changes, focusing in particular on changing society’s values. Whether the future is governed by values that are authoritarian or egalitarian, benevolent or sadistic, exploratory or rigid, might well be determined by what happens this century. Part III looks at three ways of ensuring survival.

The question of the significance of the end of civilisation raises philosophical issues. Broadly, ensuring survival increases the quantity of future life; trajectory changes increase its quality. But you might not care much about sheer quantity. If there’s no longer anyone around to care, why should it matter if civilisation has ended? And maybe, on balance, the future is more bad than good. If these worries were correct, then the longtermist priority should be to increase the average value of future civilisation rather than its duration. Improving our trajectory would be more important than ensuring survival.  Part IV tackles these issues. I argue both that we should think of the nonexistence of future generations as a moral loss, if the people in them would have sufficiently good lives, and that we should expect the future to be more good than bad, on balance. Ensuring survival is therefore just as great a priority as improving our trajectory.

Part V turns to action. Longtermism is not just abstract philosophical speculation. It’s an idea that people are putting into practice today. Chapter 10 looks at what some people are doing today to try to make the long term better, and how you can help.

Thinking in Bets

Liv Boeree. Expected value theory is not just useful when gambling. It’s crucial whenever we have to take a bet — that is, to make a decision in the face of uncertainty — which is almost all the time.

Buildering that was hugely foolish — not because it was likely that I would fall and die, but because it wasn’t sufficiently unlikely, and dying is so bad that even a small chance is well worth avoiding.  The uncertainty around climate change is not symmetric.  The uncertainty gives us more reason to worry, not less. It’s as if my teenage self, before jumping off a building, had reassured onlookers by saying, “It’s OK, I’ve no idea how far I’ll fall!”

I’m not saying that we should be confident that value lock-in or major catastrophe will occur this century. What I am saying is that their chance of occurring is very real—certainly more than 1 percent, and certainly greater than many everyday risks, like dying in a car crash. When combined with how much is at stake, the expected value of trying to ensure a good future is enormous.

Moments of Plasticity

Korea was divided along the thirty-eighth parallel. US Constitution. Early plasticity, later rigidity.

Part II. Trajectory Changes

Chapter 3: Moral Change

Abolition

Over twelve million enslaved people were taken from Africa, including 470,000 to British North America, 1.6 million to the Spanish colonies, 4.2 million to the Caribbean, and 5.5 million to Brazil.

Benjamin Lay.  Britain’s parliament was persuaded to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and to make owning people illegal across most of the British Empire in 1833.  After 1807 the British government resolved to stamp out slave trading worldwide. They used diplomacy and bribery to persuade other nations to ban the transatlantic slave trade and used the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron to police the seas. The campaign ultimately captured more than two thousand slave ships and freed over two hundred thousand enslaved people.

The abolition of slavery was an example of a values change, by which I mean a change in the moral attitudes of a society, or in how those attitudes are implemented and enforced.  This chapter will look at the significance and contingency of values changes; the next chapter will discuss their persistence.

The Significance of Values

The extreme significance of moral values. Moral views on the status of women. LGBTQ +. Corporal punishment.  Attitudes towards nationalism and immigration have life-changing implications for the hundreds of millions of international migrants. Our attitudes towards animal welfare have huge implications for the billions of animals that are raised in factory farms.

The effects of moral change are unusually predictable.  If you can ensure that people in the future adopt a particular goal, then you can trust them to pursue whatever strategies make the most sense.  “Dead hand problem” in philanthropy.  ScotsCare in London.

The Contingency of Values 

The consensus among biologists is that evolution can sometimes be contingent and sometimes noncontingent.  Fitness landscape, multiple equilibra.

The universality of conspicuous consumption suggests that there is cultural evolutionary pressure towards it. But the form that it takes is highly contingent: in some cultures , it can take the form of purchasing luxury goods; in others, it can take the form of philanthropy. In many religions it is important for adherents to demonstrate their piety or moral integrity. But different religions have developed very different ways of accomplishing this goal.

Entrenchment of values creates multiple equilibria because there is a significant element of chance in which value system becomes most powerful at a particular place and time, and because, once a value system has become sufficiently powerful, it can stay that way by suppressing the competition.  Even in cases where there is a single equilibrium, the process of reaching it might be slow.

The Contingency of Abolition

The most expensive international moral effort in modern history.  Moral regress.  Christopher Leslie Brown. Moral Capital.  Antislavery organizing was odd rather than inevitable.

What to Do

Imagine if the Industrial Revolution had occurred in vegetarian-friendly India. Perhaps then the enormous rise of factory farming over the last century would never have occurred.

The expected contingency of moral norms is high enough that the value of ensuring that the world is on the right track, morally, is enormously high.

Particular moral rules can easily fail to achieve their intended purpose in contexts different to those in which they were originally proposed.  As longtermists, when trying to improve society’s values, we should focus on promoting more abstract or general moral principles or, when promoting particular moral actions, tie them into a more general worldview. This helps ensure that these moral changes stay relevant and robustly positive into the future.

We should aspire to be weirdos like him. Others may mock you for being concerned about people who live on the other side of the planet, or about pigs and chickens, or about people who will be born in thousands of years’ time. But many at the time mocked the abolitionists. We are very far from creating the perfect society, and until then, in order to drive forward moral progress, we need morally motivated heretics who are able to endure ridicule from those who wish to preserve the status quo. 

Leah Garcés is the president of Mercy for Animals. Revolutionary beliefs; cooperative behaviour.

Chapter 4: Value Lock-In

The Hundred Schools of Thought

Sixth century BC China. Confucius.  Legalism.  Daoism. Mohism, the first consequentialists eg protecting cities. The Hundred Schools of Thought ended in 221 BC, when the Legalism-influenced Qin conquered all of China and tried to purge. Then Liu Bang became the founding emperor of the Han dynasty and Confucianism  emerged as the orthodox ideology of the Chinese Empire.

The Persistence of Values

Values can be highly persistent. Eg Bible, Quran, Confucius’s Analects.

Value lock-in: technological advances could radically alter the dynamic of moral change that we are used to.

Previous technology has already enabled values to persist for longer, and with higher fidelity, than they could otherwise have done.  Writing enabled complex ideas to be transmitted many generations into the future without inevitable distortion by the failures of human memory.

Artificial General Intelligence

DeepMind’s AlphaGo in 2016. 

An increase in the rate of technological progress is the first reason why AGI would be a monumental event. The second reason, crucial from a longterm perspective, is AGI’s potential longevity.

Pong by Atari, released in 1977.  Pong will live on.  AGI agents are potentially immortal.

AI and Entrenchment. AI Takeover.

How Long Till AGI?

Ajeya Cotra on computing power.  There’s a very significant chance that one of the most important developments in all of history will occur within our lifetimes.

Culture and Lock – In

How Locked – In Are We Already?

Homogeneity in the global response to COVID-19 was responsible for millions of deaths.

Building a Morally Exploratory World

1984:  A boot stamping on a human face — forever.  Swastika Night, Katharine Burdekin, 1935.

There are so many ethical questions to which we know we haven’t yet figured out the answer. We should also worry about gross moral errors that we haven’t yet even considered.  The primary question is how we can build a society such that, over time, our moral views improve.

As an ideal, we could aim for what we can call the long reflection: a stable state of the world in which we are safe from calamity and we can reflect on and debate the nature of the good life, working out what the most flourishing society would be. Long because of how long it would be worth spending on it.

Political experimentalism.  Charter cities.

The most important mechanisms for improving our moral views are reason, reflection, and empathy.

Lock-in paradox.  Liberal ideas to lock-in to prevent a more thoroughgoing lock-in of values.

Part III. Safeguarding Civilisation

Chapter 5: Extinction

Spaceguard

Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.  1994 Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 thudded into the side of Jupiter. Spaceguard a success.

Engineered Pathogens

Most of this book was written during the COVID-19 pandemic. Uncontrolled pathogen escapes are almost commonplace.  Anthrax. The United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union all had major bioweapons programmes. The Soviets’ was most extensive by far, lasting sixty-four years and employing as many as sixty thousand personnel at its height.

He  convinced the Japanese military to pursue a bioweapons programme, arguing that biological warfare must be worth pursuing, “otherwise, it would not have been outlawed by the League of Nations.” Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote that he had only become aware of their destructive power after “the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply.”

Open Philanthropy, was one of the few pre-COVID funders of pandemic preparedness in the world.  Nicola Sturgeon dinner: “freaking everyone oot.”

Great-Power War

When people are at war or fear war, they do stupid things. Maintaining the Long Peace has involved a healthy dose of luck in addition to structural factors like economic growth and international cooperation.  Power transition periods. Helpful if countries do not share a border or claim any of the same territory,  if economies are also entwined.  Great-power war also increases the risk of a host of other risks to civilisation.

Would a Technologically Capable Species Re-evolve?

If some step in our evolutionary history was extremely improbable, there might be no other highly intelligent life elsewhere in the affectable universe, and there might never be. If this is true, then our actions are of cosmic significance.  With great rarity comes great responsibility. The universe’s self-understanding might be permanently lost.

Chapter 6: Collapse

The Fall of Empires

It wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that any European city surpassed the population of Rome at its ancient peak. Civilisational collapse: lost ability to recreate most modern technology.

The Historical Resilience of Global Civilisation

Collapse of Rome severe in Britain.  But collapses not global, big population falls rare.  Black Death increased wages. Late 1600s ‘General Crisis.’ Remarkable societal resilience.  Hiroshima recovery.

Would We Recover from Extreme Catastrophes?

Total US and Russian stockpiles have fallen by a factor of seven since their peak in 1986. But they are still very high, with 9,500 nuclear warheads remaining. 

New Zealand.  A postcatastrophe world would be better off than the world in 2,500 BC because of knowledge, physical capital, and institutions. Seems very likely that agriculture would survive a catastrophe.  Industrialisation happens fairly quickly (on historical timescales) once the knowledge of how to industrialise is there. [Would birth control stop population growth?]

Climate Change

One cause for optimism is that we are making real progress on climate change. The cost of solar panels has fallen by a factor of 250 since 1976, while the cost of lithium ion batteries has fallen by a factor of 41 since 1991.

Fossil Fuel Depletion

Conclusion 

If humanity is like a teenager, then she is one who speeds round blind corners, drunk, without wearing a seat belt.

We need to both make catastrophic risks as small as possible and ensure they stay small indefinitely. But if society stagnates technologically, it could remain stuck in a period of high catastrophic risk for such a long time that extinction or collapse would be all but inevitable.

Chapter 7: Stagnation

Efflorescences

Islamic Golden Age.

If we had plateaued at 1920s technology we would have been stuck relying on fossil fuels. Like a climber scaling a sheer cliff face with no ropes or harness, with a significant risk of falling. In such a situation, staying still is no solution; that would just wear us out, and we would fall eventually.

Is Technological Progress Slowing Down?

Total factor productivity. Since 1970, the pace of progress seems to have slowed. Exponential economic growth can’t go on forever.

How Likely Is Stagnation?

Negative effect of picking the low-hanging fruit exceeds using previous discoveries so past progress makes future progress harder. [Other aspects of economic growth – catch up, free trade, good government.]

The number of scientists in the world is doubling every couple of decades, such that at least three-quarters of all scientists who have ever lived are alive today.

Increasing population sizes have been a major factor in rates of technological progress. Michael Kremer.The more populous a region was in 10,000 BC, the more complex their technology was by AD 1500.  More minds meant more inventions.

If we get to AGI before we stagnate, then longterm stagnation is not an issue. Biotechnology could provide another pathway to rebooting growth.

How Long Would Stagnation Last?

If there are a diversity of societies, with evolving cultures and institutional arrangements over time, then it seems likely that one will manage to restart growth. A single sustained high-fertility culture would ultimately drive global population growth.

Stagnation from a Longtermist Perspective

People are more morally motivated in times of economic growth. 

The prevailing moral worldview could simply be whatever one most champions very high fertility; perhaps this would be a worldview with very inegalitarian gender norms.

We may be about to enter an unsustainable state with high existential risk. We need to get beyond this unsustainable state and develop technologies to defend against these risks.

Part IV. Assessing the End of the World

Chapter 8: Is It Good to Make Happy People?

Derek Parfit

He was utterly single-minded in his pursuit of improving our moral understanding.  The driving force behind Parfit’s moral concern was suffering. What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history.  

Wellbeing or happiness — I use the terms interchangeably.

The Intuition of Neutrality

Jan Narveson: “We are in favour of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people.”  Those surveyed did not have the intuition of neutrality.

Clumsy Gods: The Fragility of Identity

Parfit noted that our existence in the world is exceptionally unlikely , and the identity of future people is exceptionally fragile, and that major ethical implications follow from this.

Why the Intuition of Neutrality is Wrong

 Parfit called the quest for the correct theory of population ethics the quest for “Theory X.”

The Average View

The Total View

Big and Flourishing or Enormous and Drab. Listening to Muzak and eating potatoes. Three assumptions give Repugnant Conclusion.  Dominance Addition. Non-Anti-Egalitarianism. Transitivity.  One option is simply to accept the Repugnant Conclusion — and perhaps argue that it is not quite as repugnant as it first seems. This is the view that I incline towards.

The Critical Level View

Paradox: on the critical level view, adding a hundred people at wellbeing level 5 to the population is worse than adding ten people at − 30 wellbeing.

What You Ought to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do

Extend expected value theory to incorporate uncertainty about value too.

The Benefits of Having Kids

Americans want to have 2.6 children on average but have only 1.8. Children have positive effects as well as negative ones. Just as you can live a good life by being helpful to those around you, donating to charity , or working in a socially valuable career, I think you can live a good life by raising a family and being a loving parent.

Bigger Is Better

Moral case for space settlement.

Chapter 9: Will the Future Be Good or Bad?

Sentience as a Single Life

If you lived through every life up until today, would you think that your life has been good, on balance? When you look to the future, is it with a sense of optimism or dread? If you found out that the human race was certain to peter out within the next few centuries, would you greet that knowledge with sadness because of all the joys you would lose or with a sense of relief because of all the horrors you would avoid? Imagine that you live through the lives of all sentient creatures.  Your life as a human being would amount to only one – hundred billionth of your time on Earth. If this were your life, the evolution of Homo sapiens would be a jarring event: for the first time you would no longer merely be experiencing; you would also be able to understand and conceptualize your experiences. 

The more optimistic we are, the more important it is to avoid permanent collapse or extinction; the less optimistic we are, the stronger the case for focusing instead on improving values or other trajectory changes.

Parfit: We can call such people supra-human . Our descendants might, I believe, make the further future very good . . . . Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine.

How Many People Have Positive Wellbeing?

The leading approach to measuring the burden of disease, which is widely used by governments and philanthropists when setting health-care policy, assumes that death is the worst possible state one can be in, even though this is clearly false.   It thereby systematically biases policies towards saving life over improving quality of life.

Three main theories of wellbeing.

Getting what you want does not make your life better unless it improves the balance of positive and negative conscious experiences. 

Only a handful of wellbeing studies have directly addressed the question of for whom life is positive on balance. There are three main psychological approaches that bear on this issue.

Life satisfaction surveys.  People are relativising their answers to what is realistically attainable in their country or the world at present. One British study places the neutral point between 1 and 2.  This implies between 5 and 10 percent of people in the world have lives that are below neutral. Mainly provide insights into relative levels of wellbeing across different people, countries, and demographics. They do not provide much guidance on people’s absolute level.

A second line of evidence is from surveys that simply ask people if they are happy. Third approach experience sampling. Skipping study – people in the survey, on average, would skip around 40 percent of their day.

Are People Getting Happier

Though Easterlin’s paradox continues to be influential, it doesn’t actually exist. [Too emphatic].  More recent work with better data strongly supports the view that countries get happier as they get richer. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor , and I like rich a whole lot better. Recent research has found that lottery winners are happier.

Hadza from Tanzania.  The apparent harmony and desirability of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Nonhuman animals

Weighting by neurons.  By neuron count, humans outweigh all farmed animals (including farmed fish) by a factor of thirty to one. Central question: how good is the life of a wild fish? It’s at best highly unclear, given what we currently know, whether wild animals have positive wellbeing or not. The biomass of wild land mammals has decreased by a factor of seven compared to prehuman times. 

But if we assess the lives of wild animals as being worse than nothing on average, which I think is plausible (though uncertain), then we arrive at the dizzying conclusion that from the perspective of the wild animals themselves, the enormous growth and expansion of Homo sapiens has been a good thing.

Non-wellbeing Goods

The artistic output of our species has increased dramatically: a higher population means more artists. 

How you evaluate these trends depends on the weight you put on non-wellbeing “bads,” like destruction of the environment, and on “goods,” like democracy and scientific progress.

The intuitive asymmetry between happiness and suffering.  [Peak experiences may be valued more than peak pains are disvalued because they are meaningful, eg toothache is annoying, to be got through, a romance is living to the full. Life can be cherished. Asymmetry towards being alive even if imperfect. But contrast with caution in deontlogy – not wanting to risk causing harm to others.]

The key argument for optimism about the future concerns an asymmetry in the motivation of future people — namely, people sometimes produce good things just because the things are good, but people rarely produce bad things just because they are bad. [But entropy, disorder more probable than order.]

Although they are rare in the population as a whole, malevolent, sadistic, or psychopathic actors may be disproportionately likely to gain political power.

The badness of anti-eutopia is greater than the goodness of eutopia, but eutopia is much more likely than anti-eutopia.

Part V. Taking Action

Chapter 10: What to Do

Backs to the Future

In the English language, the future is ahead of us and the past is behind.  In the Aymara language, the more important feature of time is what we know and what we don’t . We can see the present and the past; they are laid out before us.

Even over the course of writing this book, I’ve changed my mind on a number of crucial issues. I take historical contingency, and especially the contingency of values, much more seriously. 

Unknown unknowns.  It can be easy to feel clueless, as if there’s nothing at all we can do. But that would be too pessimistic.

Three lessons — take robustly good actions , build up options , and learn more.

Which Priorities Should You Focus On? 

Help find new crucial considerations.

How to Act

Donations are more impactful than changing personal consumption.  Whatever else you do in life, donations are one way to do an enormous amount of good. Beyond donations, three other personal decisions seem particularly high impact to me: political activism, spreading good ideas, and having children.

Career Choice

How, then, should you decide on a career? Again, we can return to our expedition metaphor. The three key lessons we identified were to learn more, build options, and take robustly good actions. Even if there is a small chance of success, the expected value of focusing on upside options can be great.

 Doing Good Collectively

Building a Movement

A movement of morally motivated people, concerned about the whole scope of the future.  

Positive moral change is not inevitable. It’s the result of long, hard work by generations of thinkers and activists.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of years in humanity’s past and the potentially billions of years in her future, we find ourselves living now, at a time of extraordinary change. A time marked by the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with thousands of nuclear warheads standing ready to fire. A time when we are burning through our finite fossil fuel reserves, producing pollution that might last hundreds of thousands of years. A time when we can see catastrophes on the horizon — from engineered pathogens to value lock-in to technological stagnation — and can act to prevent them.

This is a time when we can be pivotal in steering the future onto a better trajectory. There’s no better time for a movement that will stand up, not just for our generation or even our children’s generation, but for all those who are yet to come.

Acknowledgements

Literally hundreds of people helped shape the words on these pages.

Appendices

Further resources.  Whatweowethefuture.com.  The Precipice.  Cold Takes.

Terminology

The SPC Framework.  The ITN Framework.

Objections to Longtermism

Notes

Georgia Ray’s The Funnel of Human Experience 2018 [from her blog]

I think the case for thinking that we’re (“merely”) at an enormously influential time is very strong.

Chapter 2, Note 22 gives MacAskill’s estimates of likelihood of scenarios and his differences with Ord.