William MacAskill's book What We Owe the Future is a book to be savored and ruminated over. I can't claim to have fully done that, but am hoping that writing about it here will get me closer to digesting the philosophical concepts. As someone involved in climate change advocacy, thinking about future generations or having a hundred-year time horizon is not new to me, but MacAskill's definition of longtermism is not a roadmap till 2100. He wants us to think in terms of millennia. After all, most mammals survive for a million years and Homo Sapiens is not your run-of-the mill box standard mammal. So we can expect our species to last more than a million years provided those of us alive today plan for such a future.
Why Longtermism?
He makes a moral argument that future people matter and they will be more numerous than the current 8 billion of us. However, they are disenfranchised because they cannot vote/sue/plead/bargain with us and so it is imperative as moral beings that we keep them in mind and know that we can positively impact their future.
Threats to Longtermism
So if you bought into the why, then you are now faced with potential threats to the future. How does he identify these threats or problems? He uses a three-pronged framework with significance, persistence, and contingency as the three parts. One of the examples he uses in the book is that of slavery. It was a significant problem affecting millions of people worldwide, it lasted for several hundred years demonstrating it was persistent, but was it contingent - could it have gone away on its own or did it depend on a particular event/ person in the abolitionist movement? Here he introduces us to Benjamin Lay, a person I had never heard of, who kickstarted the abolitionist beliefs amongst Quakers by being a demonstrative moral force. He makes a case that without that turning point in the western world it would have been much harder to get rid of slavery. With this background he goes on to identify the following threats.
1. Climate Change
This is pretty obvious but it is not just the loss of biodiversity, coral reefs, ice sheets that he is concerned about. A bigger threat because of climate change would be the impact on economic growth rate which in turn can lead to the second threat
2. Civilizational Collapse
In the past many civilizations have collapsed (Rome being the obvious one) but it did not threaten humanity as a whole because at any given time there was a diversity of cultures and political systems around the world. However if the species as a whole is threatened to extinction then we reach a point of no return. What can cause an extinction event - pandemics, wars, and AGI are his potential candidates. To recover from a collapse we will need some foundational technologies and exhausting all the fossil fuel is not a great idea as we might have to rely on them for restarting civilization. Preserving seeds, preserving knowledge are all actions we can take now anticipating this threat.
3. Values Lock-In
Here he talks about the persistence of values in society. Some values get locked in and become harder to change over time. If certain values get locked in early then it becomes very hard to dislodge them in the future. On the cultural side he brings up values of colonialism, fascism and a number of extreme ideologies which appeared to lock up humanity's fate for good over many many years. A recent example of a value lock-in he provides is the global pandemic response. While some countries were a bit more authoritarian than the others and Sweden did its own thing, the rest of the world quickly locked onto one way of handling the pandemic and the vaccine trials. By adopting a more diverse set of approaches he believes that a vaccine would have arrived much earlier and we would have learned more about the disease.
In the sphere of technology he is worried that some lock-in is happening a bit too fast - AGI and synthetic biology are two areas where he is advocating for more ethical research to happen before the tech goes out of control. Although space travel is part of his larger vision he thinks it is too early to lock-in the tech now and believes we first need a framework for cosmos governance etc before billionaires start escaping into space.
What kind of values are better for the future? He lists a few - cosmpolitanism, concern for non-human animals, liberalism, and consequentialism. Please read the book for more details on each value.
What Can We Do?
Given that our predictions for the future are so unreliable are there steps we can take today to produce a positive change hundreds or thousands of years from now? MacAskill provides a simple three rule guiding principle
- Take steps that we can be comparatively confident that are good (e.g. invest in clean energy and leave fossil fuels in the ground)
- Keep options open (e.g. encourage diverse cultures/ thoughts/ political systems)
- Continue to learn more
How to choose the problems to work on?
- Use the significant, persistent, contingent framework
- Focus on neglected problems (he thinks there is a lot of momentum towards addressing climate change but not enough around AI/ Bioethics or even nuclear power)
Finally what is it that an individual can do?
Here he rightly argues that very often the focus quickly comes down to personal consumption - fly less, become vegetarian, recycle. While these are entry points and maybe are important to an individual's life as a moral being and can shield them from accusations of hypocrisy, they are insignificant compared to other things we can do
- Donate to the right groups: For e.g. becoming vegetarian saves 6 tonnes of CO2 over a 80 year life span. However, he argues donating $3000 to Clean Air Task Force can reduce 3000 tonnes per year
- Political activism
- Spread good ideas - talk to friends, family and co-workers about longtermism and what's at stake
- Have children - this needs a whole lot of discussion; he is not recommending that anyone dictate what a woman should/shouldn't do; but he is arguing against the idea proposed by some environmental activists that not having children reduces our carbon footprint. He makes some compelling arguments for why it is good for the species to have children. Read his book to learn more. He has a lot of info on population ethics.
This book has left me with so many questions and I am still thinking through all the points he has raised. I also finished Cixin Liu's Remembrances of the Earth's Past trilogy (Three Body Problem). This dystopia offers a very different view of longtermism. Spanning over hundreds of years this sci-fi trilogy allows us to grapple with many of the philosophical concepts that MacAskill raises but not in an optimistic way. I was so affected by this trilogy for many weeks after finishing it. But that's for another day.
MacAskill provides us with a right dose of optimism and I recommend this book to everyone. Am posting below a few resources
Resources
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