What do we owe future generations?
William MacAskill’s deep dive into our ethical responsibilities toward future generations is the best book I’ve read all year.
Close your eyes and imagine that you have lived and will live through the life of every single human being who has ever lived. As soon as you’ve made it through the first life, you go all the way back and live through the life of whoever came next.
That’s what William MacAskill asks us to do in the introduction to What We Owe the Future.
It’s a thought experiment designed to open your eyes to the central premise of the book which is that people matter, even if they live thousands of miles away or thousands of years hence.
I thought this book was going to be about climate change, but it was so much more. This book reaches hundreds, thousands, millions, and even something like 10 billion years in the future (if we make it into space before the sun crashes into the earth). For contrast, up until about 12,000 years ago, we were basically living in caves. So we’re talking about changing the lives of people who live unfathomable amounts of time away from us — people to whom we are ancient history.
MacAskill calls this kind of thinking longtermism — the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. In order to be successful longtermists, there are, broadly speaking, two things we need to do: make the future a nice place to live, and prevent permanent collapse or extinction (so that there actually is a future to live).
MacAskill sets forth, in detail, how we can make both of these happen — and the suggestions will probably deeply surprise you.
Author: William MacAskill
About: How today’s actions affect tomorrow’s generations (as it turns out, it’s not about climate change)
Rating: 5/5
Favourite quote: “Astronomically good futures seem eminently possible, whereas astronomically bad futures seem very unlikely.”
Mental models
Second-order thinking
When evaluating their options, most people don’t spend nearly enough time on the consequences of each. When they do, they typically stop at the most obvious, and fail to consider how those consequences have consequences — and so on, and so on. A lack of second-order thinking is why so many government interventions fail and why hindsight always seems obvious.
Sounding the alarm
I don’t know what to call this mental model, so we’ll go with this for now. MacAskill brings up the interesting idea that in some scenarios (the example he uses is biological warfare), sounding the alarm can make the event more likely. I see similarities here to the copycat effect common among suicides and violent crimes. Sometimes, the more we talk about something — even when warning against it — the more likely it becomes.
Early plasticity, later rigidity
There are times of change and turbulence, and times where things seemed to be all but locked in. MacAskill characterizes these states as plasticity and rigidity, noting that plasticity frequently comes after a crisis, like a war or a pandemic. Think, for example, of the new work-from-home reality created as a result of COVID-19. During plastic times, it’s easier to experiment and make change. (Same goes for ideas in their infancy, before they’re locked in.) Once the dust has settled, it’s far harder to make a change to the status quo.
The lock-in paradox
Closely linked to the concept of early plasticity, later rigidity, MacAskill warns about the potential consequences of a premature ‘lock-in’ of values. For example, if AI is trained based on current human knowledge and biases but then quickly takes over the world, these biases will be ‘locked in’ for a very long time. Ironically, to prevent lock-in, we’ll need to lock in some institutions and ideas to help protect against this phenomenon. We’ll also need to focus on the adoption of goals rather than particularly policies for long-range planning, as policies are quickly outdated, whereas goals offer the flexibility to adapt policies based on current conditions.
Says MacAskill: “The lock-in paradox thus resembles the familiar paradox of tolerance—the necessity for liberal societies to defend themselves against intolerant views that would undermine their freedom, even if doing so requires curtailing the very tolerance they want to preserve.”
The rate of progress
We live in an age defined by rapid technological progress, but technological progress is actually slowing down. Why? The more discoveries we make, the more difficult it is to make a discovery. All the low-hanging fruit has been figured out, meaning big breakthroughs come much less frequently. Ultimately, past progress makes future progress harder.
Says MacAskill: “In order to double our overall level of technological advancement, we need to put in, conservatively, four times as much research effort as we did for the previous doubling.”
Did you read What We Owe the Future? Let me know what you thought.
Relevant reads:
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Steven Pinker, 2019)
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Toby Ord, 2021)
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values (Brian Christian, 2021)
