What We Owe The Future
How to do the most good for the most people — key takeaways from the book by longtermist William MacAskill.
Positively influencing the future is a moral priority
- Longtermist beliefs are present in many cultures throughout history. MacAskill mentions the Iriquois Confederacy, whose “seventh-generation” principle states that all key decisions made should relate to the well-being of the seventh generation to come.
- If we last as long as the typical mammalian species (around 1 million years), there will be a million future people alive for every one person today, so it is crucial to prepare for that future.
- The earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions of years, and but natural processes will return carbon dioxide concentrations to preindustrial levels only after hundreds of thousands of years. Even if we level carbon emissions, we will still experience significant effects of our current carbon impact.
- Many of the societal and environmental factors we are experiencing point to us being at an inflection point in history, according to Longtermists, in which the choices we make might soon become solidified for centuries or millennia. It is therefore crucial to act now to shape beneficial future-thinking policies and processes.
Our Climate Future
- We need to decarbonize within 50 years. We are behind on this goal, and energy demand is expected to triple over that time.
- The climate crisis (including warming as high as 7 degrees Celsius) and breakdown of international relations could criple our decarbonization efforts.
- Current renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind cannot meet our current needs. We will need to invent, in a short amount of time, sources of sustainable energy that do not currently exist.
A Framework For Thinking About the Future
A decision’s “expected value” should be weighed by 3 factors:
- significance (value in bringing about a state of affairs)
- persistence (how long it lasts),
- contingency (extent to which it depends on a small number of specific actions that would not otherwise occur through other means)
Cultural evolution can be described by 3 principles:
- variation: cultural traits vary
- differential fitness: different characteristics have different rates of survival
- inheritance: cultural traits can be transmitted
An example of cultural evolution: 1 in 5 Asians say they are vegetarian, while 1 in 20 North Americans do. If the industrial revolution had occurred in vegetarian-friendly India, how would that have changed the course of factory farming?
What can you do?
The most important action you can take personally is your choice of career. You will spend 80,000 hours of your life on your career. If you find a career twice as impactful as your current one, it’s worth spending half your career looking for that career.
- Donating to effective charities can have a 10X greater impact on carbon reduction than personal actions such as changing consumption habits or reducing travel.
- Working on problems together will allow us to achieve far more than working individually. A community gets to learn from the mistakes and triumphs of its members.
If We Cease to Exist, Will The Robots Carry Our Values Forward?
Some Longtermists believe that AI (specifically Artificial General Intelligence, which they believe is achievable as early as 2050) has the ability to codify our current values into systems that will carry forward long into the future, potentially long after the human species.
Whoever successfully develops AGI could dictate the shape it takes, including who has power (e.g. the Military, a large corporation), and
how morally exploratory it can be.
