Compendium 43 — What We Owe The Future
A popular proverb says, “A society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.” ― William MacAskill
📖 Brief Overview
What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill explores the concept of longtermism, a philosophical framework that emphasizes the importance of shaping the distant future through our actions today. MacAskill argues that the potential scale of future humanity is vast, with billions or even trillions of lives yet to be lived, making the impact of our current decisions disproportionately significant.
The book delves into ethical considerations surrounding how we can influence the trajectory of human civilization to maximize well-being for future generations. It outlines key risks that threaten the long-term survival and flourishing of humanity, such as nuclear war, artificial intelligence, climate change, and pandemics. MacAskill emphasizes the importance of reducing these existential risks to ensure a thriving future.
The book also examines ways in which technological and societal developments can positively or negatively affect future outcomes. It advocates for a responsible approach to emerging technologies and proposes strategies to encourage societal norms that prioritize long-term thinking.
Throughout the book, MacAskill presents a compelling case for adopting a longtermist perspective, offering practical guidance on how individuals and societies can contribute to a safer and more prosperous future. The overarching theme is that our actions today can have a profound and lasting impact on the course of history, making it crucial to take responsibility for our influence on the world that future generations will inherit.
💡 Three Key Takeaways
1: Value Lock-in
Value lock-in: an event that causes a single value system, or set of value systems, to persist for an extremely long time. Value lock-in would end or severely curtail the moral diversity and upheaval that we are used to. If value lock-in occurred globally, then how well or poorly the future goes would be determined in significant part by the nature of those locked-in values. Some changes in values might still occur, but the broad moral contours of society would have been set, and the world would enact one of only a small number of futures compared to all those that were possible.
The lock-in of some values, like Nazi or Stalinist values, would obviously have been horrific. Illustrations of some of these scenarios have been sketched in fiction. Most famous is George Orwell’s 1984, in which this bleak prospect is epitomised in the famous metaphor of “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Even more impressive, in my view, is Swastika Night, written by Katharine Burdekin. It takes seriously Hitler’s claim that he would create a thousand-year Reich: set seven hundred years in the future, it depicts a world which is entirely controlled by the Nazis and the Japanese Empire. In the German Empire, non-Germans have been subjugated, violence is glorified, and women are kept in pens and raped at will. To us, it reads like a piece of alternative history, but it was really a prophetic warning about ideological lock-in; the book was written in 1935, four years before World War II broke out, and published in 1937, twelve years before 1984, at a time when Hitler still had considerable international prestige. From what I’ve said so far, you might conclude that we should aim to lock in the values we, today, think are right, thereby preventing dystopia via the lock-in of worse values. But that would be a mistake. While the lock-in of Nazism and Stalinism would have been nightmarish, the lock-in of the values of any time or place would be terrible in many respects. Think, for example, of what the world would be like if Western values of just two and a half centuries ago had been locked in. The future would be shaped by values in which slavery was permissible, there was a natural hierarchy among races, women were second-class citizens, and most varieties of sexual orientation and activity were abhorrent.
Almost all generations in the past had some values that we now regard as abominable. It’s easy to naively think that one has the best values; Romans would have congratulated themselves for being so civilised compared to their “barbarian” neighbours and in the same evening beaten people they had enslaved or visited the Colosseum to watch the disembowelment of a prisoner. It is extraordinarily unlikely that, of all generations across time, we are the first ones to have gotten it completely correct. The values you or I endorse are probably far from the best ones. Moreover, there are so many ethical questions to which we know we haven’t yet figured out the answer. Which beings have moral status: just Homo sapiens, or all primates, or all conscious creatures, including artificial beings that we might create in the future? How should we weigh the promotion of happiness against the alleviation of suffering? How should we handle uncertainty about the impact of our actions, especially when it comes to tiny probabilities of enormous payoffs? How should we act when we know we don’t know what the right thing to do is?
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