The following is a collection of quotes, images, and bullet points to give a quick overview of Will MacAskill’s book What We Owe The Future.
PART I. THE LONG VIEW
Introduction
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.
Chapter 1: The Case for Longtermism
Future people count, but we rarely count them. They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can’t bargain or trade with us, so they have little representation in the market. And they can’t make their views heard directly: they can’t tweet, or write articles in newspapers, or march in the streets. They are utterly disenfranchised.
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 size. In that case, there would be eighty trillion people yet to come; future people would outnumber us ten thousand to one.
Even if you accept that the future is big and important, you might be skeptical that we can positively affect it. […] In fact, we [predictably impact the long-term future] all the time. We drive. We fly. We thereby emit greenhouse gases with very long-lasting effects. Natural processes will return carbon dioxide concentrations to preindustrial levels only after hundreds of thousands of years.
Chapter 2: You Can Shape the Course of History
Human beings have been making choices with longterm consequences for tens of thousands of years. […] The extinction of [certain] megafauna was probably an irrevocable change to the world, made by humans with extremely primitive technology. It meant we lost, for all time, many beautiful and unique species.
We can assess the longterm value of this new state of affairs in terms of three factors: its significance, its persistence, and its contingency.
Often, some event can have highly significant, persistent, and contingent effects if there is a period of plasticity, where ideas or events or institutions can take one of many forms, followed by a period of rigidity or ossification.
For example:
The division of Korea after WWII.
The writing of the US Constitution.
The decision of which texts to include in the new testament.
It would’ve been easier to act against climate change before it was politically divisive.
PART II. TRAJECTORY CHANGES
Chapter 3: Moral Change
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.
Looking to the past, we see that such changes have had an enormous impact on the lives of billions of people. Looking to the future, if we can improve the values that guide the behaviour of generations to come, we can be pretty confident that they will take better actions.
Chapter 4: Value Lock-In
Values can be highly persistent. A familiar but remarkable fact is that the best-selling book this year, as every year, is the Bible, completed almost two thousand years ago. The second best-selling book is the Quran. Confucius’s Analects still sells hundreds of thousands of copies annually. Every day, quotes from these sources influence political decision-making around the world.
How could value lock-in occur?
Two features of AGI—potentially rapid technological progress and in-principle immortality—combine to make value lock-in a real possibility.
There are historical examples of ideologies that have sought long- lasting global domination. This was true of the Nazis, who referred to their empire as the “Thousand-Year Reich.”
PART III. SAFEGUARDING CIVILISATION
Chapter 5: Extinction
Despite the toll of COVID-19, in some respects we’ve gotten off easily. […] Looking to the future, the threat posed by pandemics may be much greater still. This greater threat comes not from naturally arising pathogens but from diseases that we ourselves will design, using the tools of biotechnology.
Especially concerning from a longtermist perspective are [wars] that pit the most powerful countries of their time—the “great powers”—against each other. This is simply because of the sheer scale of destructiveness required to cause human extinction or other irrecoverable harms to future generations: an all-out war between the world’s largest and most technologically advanced militaries is more likely to exceed that grim threshold than more limited conflicts.
Chapter 6: Collapse
An all-out nuclear war, perhaps supplemented by bioweapons, would be utterly devastating. […] Although such a catastrophe is, in my view, unlikely to lead to unrecovered civilisational collapse, it is difficult to be extremely confident that it won’t.
If civilisation did collapse, then it may be much harder to build up civilisation again because:
Burning fossil fuels […] might make civilisational recovery more difficult simply by using up a nonrenewable resource that, historically, seemed to be a critical fuel for industrialisation. […] On the path to industrialisation and out of poverty, countries begin by burning prodigious amounts of fossil fuels, usually, though not always, starting with coal and then shifting to oil and gas.
Chapter 7: Stagnation
Economists almost universally agree that in the long run, economic growth is driven by technological progress. But as we make technological progress, we pick the low-hanging fruit, and further progress inherently becomes harder and harder. So far, we’ve dealt with that by throwing more and more people at the problem. Compared to a few centuries ago, there are many, many, many more researchers, engineers, and inventors. But this trend is set to end: we simply can’t keep increasing the share of the labour force put towards research and development, and the size of the global labour force is projected to peak and then start exponentially declining by the end of this century. In this situation, our best models of economic growth predict the pace of innovation will fall to zero and the level of technological advancement will plateau.
Which would be bad because
If we stagnate and stay stuck at an unsustainable level of technological advancement, we would remain in a risky period. Every year, we’d roll the dice on whether an engineered pandemic or some other cataclysm would occur, causing catastrophe or extinction. Sooner or later, one would. To safeguard civilisation, 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?
Population ethics [is] the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be.
The view that the world is made better by having more people with sufficiently good lives is often regarded as unintuitive.
MacAskill argues that this view is philosophically implausible, for reasons which are too complicated to go into here. I will discuss this further in a future post.
Increasingly, people are starting to see the choice to have children as an unethical one because having children means greater carbon dioxide emissions and faster climate change. […] If your children have lives that are sufficiently good, then your decision to have them is good for them. With a sufficiently good upbringing, having a chance to experience this world is a benefit. […] 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.
The most important upshot of population ethics concerns the question, “How bad is the end of civilisation?” Should we care about the loss of those future people who will never be born if humanity goes extinct in the next few centuries? We now have our tentative answer: yes, it is a loss if future people are prevented from coming into existence—as long as their lives would be good enough. So the early extinction of the human race would be a truly enormous tragedy.
Chapter 9: Will the Future Be Good or Bad?
Is the happiness people experience enough to make up for the suffering?
The answer is unclear from prior research, so MacAskill commissioned a survey to find out. Here were the results:
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.
Since the Industrial Revolution, there has been a clear upward trend in wellbeing, and this gives us good reason to believe that the world will continue to get better for people over at least the next century.
What about the long-term future?
The best case scenario (eutopia) is a universe full of blissfully happy people.
The worst case scenario (anti-eutopia) is a universe full of suffering people.
People prefer to be happy, and often prefer other people to also be happy. So people are motivated to try and bring about eutopia.
Whereas it’s hard to imagine why an anti-eutopia would come about.
It’s hard to imagine how an anti-eutopia would come about.
The badness of anti-eutopia is greater than the goodness of eutopia, but eutopia is much more likely than anti-eutopia. All things considered, it seems to me that the greater likelihood of eutopia is the bigger consideration. This gives us some reason to think the expected value of the future is positive. We have grounds for hope.
PART V. TAKING ACTION
Chapter 10: What to Do
At a high-level:
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.