I reviewed What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill over 7 blog posts. This was a weird and unhelpful way to write a book review. So I took the best bits from all those posts and glued them together to make this post. The result is still weird, but slightly less unhelpful. Enjoy!
This is Will MacAskill:
He’s a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, co-founder of three non-profits, and the ringleader of the Effective Altruism movement. I think of him as being orange because of the striking design of a book he wrote called Doing Good Better.
This is not a review of that book. This is a review of Will’s new book: What We Owe The Future.
Unfortunately, WWOTF is much longer than Doing Good Better and therefore not as good. But I will be generous and review it anyway.
Living every life
What We Owe The Future opens with this provocative thought experiment:
Imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived. [...] 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.
[...]
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.
What could go wrong with the future?
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.
Can we actually affect the long term future?
Humans have been making irrevocable changes to the long term future for thousands of years
Why is Africa home to so many more species of megafauna—large animals like elephants and giraffes—than the rest of the world? You might think, as I did before learning about this topic, that the answer has to do with Africa’s particular environment. But that’s not right. Fifty thousand years ago, a great variety of megafauna roamed the planet.
Consider megatherium, a giant ground sloth and one of the largest land mammals to have ever lived, rivalling the Asian elephant in size. It went extinct 12,500 years ago.
There is a heated debate over what caused the extinctions of megafauna. Some scientists believe that natural climate change was the main driver, some believe that humans were the culprit, and some believe it was a mix of humans and climate change. In my view, the evidence is clear that humans often played a decisive role: most of these megafauna survived over a dozen similarly sized climatic changes in the past; smaller animals did not go extinct at nearly the same rate as megafauna; and the timing of their extinction usually coincides with humans’ arrival into their habitats. Though perhaps helped by climate change, it was hunting and the disruption of natural environments caused by human activity that killed them off. Unlike megafauna on other continents, African megafauna evolved alongside humans and so were better prepared for Homo sapiens as a predator.
Historical people successfully influenced the distant future for the better
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin had such a reputation for believing in the health and longevity of the United States that in 1784 a French mathematician wrote a friendly satire of him, suggesting that if Franklin was sincere in his beliefs, he should invest his money to pay out on social projects centuries later, getting the benefits of compound interest along the way. Franklin thought it was a great idea, and in 1790 he invested £1000 (about $135,000 in today’s money) each for the cities of Boston and Philadelphia: three-quarters of the funds would be paid out after one hundred years, and the remainder after two hundred years. By 1990, when the final funds were distributed, the donation had grown to almost $5 million for Boston and $2.3 million for Philadelphia.
Benjamin Lay
Here, though, I look at just one part of this narrative. Because I’m interested in whether or not abolition was contingent, I’m interested in those parts of the history that seem unexpected or difficult to explain. And, as leading historian of abolition Professor Christopher Leslie Brown puts it, “The causes of slave resistance do not seem particularly mysterious.” What is surprising, he notes, is that slavery was attacked by those who benefited from it. Moreover, enslaved people have very often throughout history powerfully resisted their oppression. So why was there a successful abolitionist campaign in Britain in the early 1800s and not in any of history’s previous slave societies?
I think that the activism of a fairly small group of Quakers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provides part of the answer. Their efforts were hugely important in one of the most surprising moral about-faces in history. There were many important figures in this story, but among the early Quaker activists, the most striking was Benjamin Lay.
Lay was born in Copford, England, in 1682. He became a sailor based in London, then a shopkeeper in Barbados, before moving in 1732 to Philadelphia, which at the time was the largest city in British North America and home to the largest Quaker community. Lay was a dwarf, standing at a little over four feet tall, and hunchbacked. He referred to himself as “Little Benjamin,” likening himself to “little David” who killed Goliath.
Lay’s moral radicalism took many forms. He opposed the death penalty and consumerism. Like many of the later abolitionists, and very unusually for the time, he became a vegetarian and even refused to wear leather or wool. Later in his life, he lived in a cave just outside Philadelphia and, boycotting all goods produced by enslaved people, made all his own clothes, wore undyed fabrics, and refused to drink tea or eat sugar.
His opposition to slavery stemmed from his time as a sailor, when he learned of the pervasiveness of rape on the transatlantic slave ships, and from the two years he spent in Barbados. Early in his time there, he whipped several enslaved people who, racked by hunger, had stolen food from his shops. He was subsequently stricken with guilt and made friends with a number of enslaved people. One of these friends, a barrel maker, had a master who would whip the people he owned every Monday morning “to keep them in awe.” One Sunday evening, in order to avoid the next day’s brutality, this friend committed suicide. Experiences like these haunted Lay for the rest of his life.
Over the course of the twenty-seven years that he lived in Pennsylvania, Lay harangued the Philadelphia Quakers about the horrors of slavery at every opportunity, and he did so in dramatic style. He once stood outside a Quaker meeting in the snow in bare feet with no coat. When passersby expressed concern, he explained that enslaved people were made to work outside for the whole winter dressed as he was. During Quaker meetings, as soon as any slave owner tried to speak, it was said that Lay would rise to his feet and shout, “There’s another negro-master!”2When kicked out of one meeting for making trouble, he lay down in the mud outside the entrance of the meetinghouse so that every member of the congregation had to step
over his body as they left. When he discovered that a local family kept a young girl as a slave, he invited their six-year-old son to his cave without telling his parents so that they would briefly know the grief of losing a child.
In his most famous stunt, at the 1738 Yearly Meeting of the Quakers, he came dressed in military uniform under a large cloak, carrying a hollow book filled with fake blood. During the meeting, he allegedly rose to his feet, threw off his cloak, and exclaimed, “Oh all you Negro masters who are contentedly holding your fellow creatures in a state of slavery,... you might as well throw off the plain coat as I do. It would be as justifiable in the sight of the Almighty, who beholds and respects all nations and colours of men with an equal regard, if you should thrust a sword through their hearts as I do through this book!” As he spoke, he splattered the gathering with the fake blood. John Woolman, who later became one of the most influential Quaker abolitionists, was likely in the audience that day.
Lay became well known across Pennsylvania. But he was not revered in his time for his activism. In fact, he was effectively disowned four times, by Quaker societies in London, Colchester, Philadelphia, and Abington. But he seems, ultimately, to have been influential within Quaker circles: in the late 1790s, Benjamin Rush wrote that a print of Lay was seen in “many houses in Philadelphia.” Lay was also friends with Anthony Benezet, who helped to make abolition mainstream in Britain. And Lay’s activism coincided with the time when moral sentiment among Quakers changed dramatically. In the period of 1681 to 1705, an estimated 70 percent of the leaders of the Quaker’s Yearly Meeting owned people; for the period 1754 to 1780 that figure was only 10 percent. In the 1758 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, it was decided that Quakers who traded people would be disciplined and then disowned (though it would be another eighteen years before owning people was also banned). When Lay was told, he reportedly shouted, “Thanksgiving and praise be rendered unto the Lord God.... I can now die in peace.” He passed away one year later.
Why should we make sacrifices for people who don’t even exist yet?
This is Derek Parfit.
Parfit said “if you try to factor in whether people already exist when doing utilitarian calculations then bad things will happen.”
He drew diagrams like this:
so he must be right.
Saying anything more complicated immediately brings up a ton of details I don’t want to get into.
Are people’s lives actually worth living? Maybe it would be better if humanity ended.
[Researchers] asked 240 people in the United States and 240 people in India a range of questions on the quality of their life so far [and] asked for qualitative comments. […] The comments from those who gave negative answers were as dark as one might expect, such as, “My life was and is a horrible thing. I would not want to relive it again,” and “I have lived through pure hell the last 20 years of my life and I would not wish it on anyone.”
[Researchers] asked participants to write down what activity they were doing and how long it would last, and then respond to the question, “If you could, and it had no negative consequences, would you jump forward in time to the end of what you’re currently doing?” That is, they asked participants to imagine having the option of simply not experiencing—though still doing—whatever activity they were engaged in at that moment.
It turns out that people in the survey, on average, would skip around 40 percent of their day if they could. In a second, smaller study, the same experimenters asked people to look back at the previous day and indicate which experiences they would have skipped if they could, and then asked them to compare pairs of experiences with each other to work out how good the experiences they’d have kept were and how bad the experiences they would’ve skipped were. For instance, a study subject might say that thirty minutes of an activity they’d rather skip—say, housework—was worth fifteen minutes of an enjoyable activity—say, dinner with friends. This would indicate that, for this study subject, having dinner with friends is twice as good per minute as doing housework is bad. Again, people skipped around 40 percent of their day, and on average, people were happier during the times they kept than they were unhappy during the times they skipped. Taking both duration and intensity into account, the negative experiences were only bad enough to cancel out 58 percent of people’s positive experiences.
The sorts of experiences people kept and skipped were what you might expect: people skipped 69 percent of the time they were working and only 2 percent of the time they were engaged in what the experimenters euphemistically called “intimate activities.” In the smaller of the two studies, in which intensity of experience was measured, 12 percent of people had lives where, on the day in question, negative experiences outweighed the positive. This does not necessarily mean that 12 percent of people have lives of negative wellbeing—these respondents might just have had a bad day.
I would guess that on either preference-satisfactionism or hedonism, most people have lives with positive wellbeing. If I were given the option, on my deathbed, to be reincarnated as a randomly selected person alive today, I would choose to do so. If I were to live through the lives of everyone alive today, I would be glad to have lived.
What are some boring facts tangentially related to longtermism?
The reason the Holocene has been conducive to agriculture is that it is warm, so frost does not destroy the growing season; it has higher carbon dioxide levels, which is good for crop yields; and it is climatically stable. If there were a collapse, we would, due to climate change, probably live in an environment one to three degrees warmer than today’s. But this seems unlikely to make a major difference: generally it is cold and low–carbon dioxide environments that make global agriculture near impossible, not warm and high–carbon dioxide environments.
This is Hegel-level boring. What happened to you MacAskill? Doing Good Better had such clear and consice prose.
Can I have an unhelpful equation?
MacAskill proposes evaluating longterm causes by estimating three values:
Multiplying these quantities together then gives an overall “importance” to the cause area.
It’s hard to see how you could measure or estimate these values even in principle. Especially contingency: you only ever get to see history play out once, so how could you possibly know the probability that history would have gone another way?
How about a sensational metaphor with made up numbers?
The chance of the end of civilisation this century, whether via extinction or permanent collapse, is far too high for us to be comfortable with. In my view, giving this a probability of at least 1 percent seems reasonable. But even if you think it is only a one-in-a-thousand chance, the risk to humanity this century is still ten times higher than the risk of your dying this year in a car crash. If humanity is like a teenager, then she is one who speeds round blind corners, drunk, without wearing a seat belt.
Mixed metaphors?
To illustrate the claims in this book, I rely on three primary metaphors throughout. The first is of humanity as an imprudent teenager. Most of a teenager’s life is still ahead of them, and their decisions can have lifelong impacts. In choosing how much to study, what career to pursue, or which risks are too risky, they should think not just about short-term thrills but also about the whole course of the life ahead of them.
The second is of history as molten glass. At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes. But at some point, the glass might cool, set, and become much harder to change. The resulting shape could be beautiful or deformed, or the glass could shatter altogether, depending on what happens while the glass is still hot.
The third metaphor is of the path towards longterm impact as a risky expedition into uncharted terrain. In trying to make the future better, we don’t know exactly what threats we will face or even exactly where we are trying to go; but, nonetheless, we can prepare ourselves. We can scout out the landscape ahead of us, ensure the expedition is well resourced and well coordinated, and, despite uncertainty, guard against those threats we are aware of.
How to do longtermism?
Take robustly good actions
“For example, promoting innovation in clean technology helps keep fossil fuels in the ground, giving us a better chance of recovery after civilisational collapse; it lessens the impact of climate change; it furthers technological progress, reducing the risk of stagnation; and it has major near-term benefits too, reducing the enormous death toll from fossil fuel–based air pollution.”
Build up options
As an individual, seek flexible skills and credentials (a PhD in economics/statics is more flexible than a PhD in philosophy).
As a society, “Maintaining a diversity of cultures and political systems leaves open more potential trajectories for civilisation.”
Learn more
“As individuals, we can develop a better understanding of the different causes that I’ve discussed in this book and build up knowledge about relevant aspects of the world.”
“As a civilisation, we can invest resources into doing better—building mirrors that enable us to see, however dimly, into the future that lies behind us.”
General disaster preparedness also seems robustly good. This can include things like increasing food stockpiles; building bunkers to protect more people from worst-case catastrophes; developing forms of food production not dependent on sunlight in case of nuclear winter; building seed vaults with heirloom seeds that could be used to restart agriculture; and building information vaults with instructions for creating the technologies necessary to rebuild civilisation.
Some specific actions MacAskill recommends:
Donating to effective charities
Going vegan/vegetarian
Political activism
Spreading good ideas
Having children
Choosing a high-impact career
We’ve met some people who made a difference in this book: abolitionists, feminists, and environmentalists; writers, politicians, and scientists. Looking back on them as figures from “history,” they can seem different from you and me. But they weren’t different: they were everyday people, with their own problems and limitations, who nevertheless decided to try to shape the history they were a part of, and who sometimes succeeded. You can do this, too.