Book Review: What We Owe The Future, by William MacAskill

This book is written by William MacAskill, who is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford. I decided to read the book after Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University, suggested it during one of the university’s senior teams meeting.

As presented by the author, this book is about longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time… If humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span, then, as strange as it may seem, we are the ancients: we live at the very beginning of history, in the most distant past. What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people. So we need to act wisely.

The thirty main takeaways I got out of this book are presented below:

• The author believes 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 Al 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.
• To illustrate the claims in this book, the author relies 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.
• If the author is right, then we face a huge responsibility. Relative to everyone who could come after us, we are a tiny minority. Yet we hold the entire future in our hands. Everyday ethics rarely grapples with such a scale. We need to build a moral worldview that takes seriously what’s at stake… By choosing wisely, we can be pivotal in putting humanity on the right course. And if we do, our great-great-grandchildren will look back and thank us, knowing that we did everything we could to give them a world that is just and beautiful.
• 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.
• Previous social movements, such as those for civil rights and women’s suffrage, have often sought to give greater recognition and influence to disempowered members of society. The author sees longtermism as an extension of these ideals. Though we cannot give genuine political power to future people, we can at least give consideration to them. By abandoning the tyranny of the present over the future, we can act as trustees helping to create a flourishing world for generations to come… The idea that future people count is common sense. Future people, after all, are people. They will exist. They will have hopes and joys and pains and regrets, just like the rest of us. They just don’t exist yet… To see how intuitive this is, suppose that, while hiking, I drop a glass bottle on the trail and it shatters. And suppose that if I don’t clean it up, later a child will cut herself badly on the shards.’ In deciding whether to clean it up, does it matter when the child will cut herself? Should I care whether it’s a week, or a decade, or a century from now? No. Harm is harm, whenever it occurs.
• Distance in time is like distance in space. People matter even if they live thousands of miles away. Likewise, they matter even if they live thousands of years hence. In both cases, it’s easy to mistake distance for unreality, to treat the limits of what we can see as the limits of the world. But just as the world does not stop at our doorstep or our country’s borders, neither does it stop with our generation, or the next.
• Concern for future generations is common sense across diverse intellectual traditions. The Gayanashagowa, the centuries-old oral constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, has a particularly clear statement. It exhorts the Lords of the Confederacy to “have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations.” Oren Lyons, a faithkeeper for the Onondaga and Seneca nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, phrases this in terms of a “seventh-generation” principle, saying, “We make every decision that we make relate to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come. … We consider: will this be to the benefit of the seventh generation?” However, even if you grant that future people count, there’s still a question of how much weight to give their interests. Are there reasons to care more about people alive today?
• The author is just claiming that future people matter significantly. Just as caring more about our children doesn’t mean ignoring the interests of strangers, caring more about our contemporaries doesn’t mean ignoring the interests of our descendants… Of course, we must consider the whole range of ways the future could go… Our life span as a species could be much shorter than that of other mammals if we cause our own extinction. But it could also be much longer. Unlike other mammals, we have sophisticated tools that help us adapt to varied environments; abstract reasoning, which allows us to make complex, long-term plans in response to novel circumstances; and a shared culture that allows us to function in groups of millions. These help us avoid threats of extinction that other mammals can’t.
• This has an asymmetric impact on humanity’s life expectancy. The future of civilisation could be very short, ending within a few centuries. But it could also be extremely long. The earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions of years. If we survive that long, with the same population per century as now, there will be a million future people for every person alive today. And if humanity ultimately takes to the stars, the timescales become literally astronomical. The sun will keep burning for five billion years; the last conventional star formations will occur in over a trillion years; and, due to a small but steady stream of collisions between brown dwarfs, a few stars will still shine a million trillion years from now.
• The real possibility that civilisation will last such a long time gives humanity an enormous life expectancy. A 10 percent chance of surviving five hundred million years until the earth is no longer habitable gives us a life expectancy of over fifty million years; a 1 percent chance of surviving until the last conventional star formations give us a life expectancy of over ten billion years.
• It’s not just technology that has improved people’s lives; moral change has done so, too. In 1700, women were unable to attend university, and the feminist movement did not exist.! If that well-off Brit was gay, he could not love openly; sodomy was punishable by death.20 In the late 1700s, three in four people globally were the victims of some form of forced labour; now less than 1 percent are.?’ In 1700, no one lived in a democracy. Now over half the world does.
• Just as eutopia is a real possibility, so is dystopia. The future could be one where a single totalitarian regime controls the world, or where today’s quality of life is but a distant memory of a former Golden Age, or where a third world war has led to the complete destruction of civilisation. Whether the future is wonderful or terrible is, in part, up to us… We live in an era that involves an extraordinary amount of change. To see this, consider the rate of global economic growth, which in recent decades averaged around 3 percent per year.” This is historically unprecedented. For the first 290,000 years of humanity’s existence, global growth was close to 0 percent per year; in the agricultural era that increased to around 0.1 percent, and it accelerated from there after the Industrial Revolution. It’s only in the last hundred years that the world economy has grown at a rate above 2 percent per year.
• Humanity might last for millions or even billions of years to come. But the rate of change of the modern world can only continue for thousands of years. What this means is that we are living through an extraordinary chapter in humanity’s story. Compared to both the past and the future, every decade we live through sees an extremely unusual number of economic and technological changes. And some of these changes like the inventions of fossil fuel power, nuclear weapons, engineered pathogens, and advanced artificial intelligence have the potential to impact the whole course of the future.
• The fact that our time is so unusual gives us an outsized opportunity to make a difference. Few people who ever live will have as much power to positively influence the future as we do. Such rapid technological, social, and environmental change means that we have more opportunity to affect when and how the most important of these changes occur, including by managing technologies that could lock in bad values or imperil our survival. Civilisation’s current unification means that small groups have the power to influence the whole of it. New ideas are not confined to a single continent, and they can spread around the world in minutes rather than centuries.
• Significance is the average value added by bringing about a certain state of affairs. The persistence of a state of affairs is how long that state of affairs lasts, once it has been brought about. The final aspect of the framework is contingency. This is the most subtle part of the framework. In English the word “contingency” has a few different meanings; in the sense I’m using it, an alternative term would be “noninev-itability.” Multiplying significance, persistence, and contingency together gives us the longterm value of bringing about some state of affairs.
• …changing values has particularly great significance from a longterm perspective… So we also need to consider the expected contingency of values changes… The values that are commonplace in the next few centuries might shape the entire course of the future… If we succeed at improving the moral norms that society holds today, how long might that impact last? The history of religious and moral movements suggests that the impact could persist for centuries or even thousands of years. But could our impact last even longer than that? Might it even be that, at some point in the next few centuries, the values that guide the world could get locked in and continue to shape the future indefinitely?
• 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.
• We are now living through the global equivalent of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Different moral worldviews are competing, and no single worldView has yet won out; it’s possible to alter and influence which ideas have prominence. But technological advances could cause this long period of diversity and change to come to an end.
• Artificial intelligence (Al) is a branch of computer science that aims to de. sign machines that can mimic or replicate human intelligence. Because of the success of machine learning as a paradigm, weve made enormous prog. ress in AI over the last ten years. Machine learning is a method of creating useful algorichms that does not require explicitly programming them; in. stead, it relies on learning from data, such as images, the results of computer games, or patterns of mouse clicks… Recently, the idea has been analysed by mainstream growth economists, including Nobel laureate William Nordhaus.7 There are two ways in which AGI could accelerate growth. First, a country could grow the size of its economy indefinitely simply by producing more AI workers; the country’s growth rate would then rise to the very fast rate at which we can build more Als.48 Analysing this scenario, Nordhaus found that, if the AI workers also improve in productivity over time because of continuing technological progress, then growth will accelerate without bound until we run into physical limits… If we don’t design our institutions to govern this transition well_ preserving a plurality of values and the possibility of desirable moral progress-then a single set of values could emerge dominant. They may be those championed by a single individual, the elites of a political party, the populace of a country, or even the whole world.
• What if AGI is centuries away? It would still be of enormous importance because it creates a date at which the predominant values of a time could get locked in- and what we do over the coming years could affect what values are predominant when AGI is first built. The examples of religions and other moral worldviews already show that values can persist for cen-turies, though they evolve along the way. But values could become even more persistent in the future if a single value system were to become globally dominant. If so, then the absence of conflict and competition would remove one reason for change in values over time… A second major point of lock-in, it seems to me, occurred with colonialism. Homo sapiens was geographically united when it evolved; then, after spreading across the world, it was separated into distinct populations. After the colonial era, the world became globally interconnected once again, so it became possible for a single ideology to have global reach. And indeed Western European powers killed off many alternative cultures, such as the Taino in the Americas, and forced their culture onto many others. 118 It resulted in the enormous spread of Christianity, of the English and Spanish languages, and of Western European culture more broadly. Since that point, because of globalization, most countries have been becoming more culturally Western over time.’ If this process continues, there will eventually be even greater homogenisation across cultures.
• We can not take the Long Peace for granted. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminds us that war can all too quickly return to regions that have enjoyed peace for decades, and that initially more limited disputes can push the world’s largest nuclear powers dangerously close to the brink of a direct confrontation. And there are several reasons to think that the risk of great-power war in the next hundred years remains unacceptably high… Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the community forecasting platform Metaculus more than doubled its predicted chance of a third world war by 2050, to 23 percent (defining a world war as one involving countries representing either 30 percent of GDP or 50 percent of world population and killing at least ten million people.?? If that annual risk stayed the same for the following fifty years, this would mean another world war before the end of the century is more likely than not. What makes this especially troubling is that growing military spending and new technologies are increasing humanity’s capacity to wage war. If the great powers came to blows in the future, they could deploy weapons far more destructive and lethal than those used in World War II. The potential for devastation is enormous.
• The last common ancestor of humans and chimps was alive only twelve million years ago, and it took only around two hundred million years for humans to evolve from the first mammals. And there are still at least hundreds of millions of years remaining until the sun’s increasing brightness renders the earth uninhabitable to human-size animals. Given this, if Homo sapiens went extinct and chimps survived, shouldn’t we expect a technologically capable species to evolve from chimps, like Planet of the Apes, in eight milion years or less? Similarly, even if all primates went extinct, as long as some mammals survived shouldn’t we expect a technologically capable species to evolve within around two hundred million years? This is a long time, but its still easily short enough for such evolution to occur before the earth is no longer habitable.
• With great rarity comes great responsibility. For thirteen billion years, the known universe was devoid of consciousness; there was no entity such that, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Nagel, it was like something to be them. Around five hundred million years ago, that changed, and the first conscious creatures evolved: the spark of a new flame. But those creatures were not conscious of being conscious; they did not know their place in the uni-verse, and they could not begin to understand it. And then, merely a few thousand years ago, over a little more than one ten millionth of the life span Of the universe so far, we developed writing and mathematics, and we began to inquire about the nature of reality.
• A vivid illustration of historical societal resilience comes from the Black Death, a pandemic of the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century that spread across the Middle East and Europe. The Black Death was mainly spread by infected fleas transported across the world by rats on trade ships fleeing the Mongol invasion of Crimea. It may have been the deadliest natural catastrophe in history when measured as a percentage of world population lost. Somewhere between one-quarter and one-half of all Europeans died, and the Middle East was also terribly affected.? All in all, around one-tenth of the global population lost their lives.30 Those who died did so in utter misery.
• …thanks in part to youth activism, attention towards climate change has increased significantly, and several key players have made ambitious climate pledges, most notably China, which plans to reach zero emissions by 2060, and the European Union, which is aiming for 2050; and efforts are increasing at the state level in the United States. Second, there has also been huge progress on key low carbon energy technologies: solar, wind, and batteries.
• One of the overall conclusions of the book is that an all-out nuclear war, perhaps supplemented by bioweapons, would be utterly devastating. Yet the risks from weapons of mass destruction and a potential war between the world’s major powers have largely fallen out of the mainstream conversation among those fighting for a better world. I find this both striking and concerning… 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. 17 If humanity is like a teenager, then she is one who speeds round blind corners, drunk, without wearing a seat belt.
• If we want humanity to survive and fourish over the long term, we need to both make catastrophic risks as small as possible and ensure they stay small indefinitely. But if society stagnates technologically, it could remain stuck in a period of high catastrophic risk for such a long time that extinction or collapse would be all but inevitable… Our next level of technological advancement might be unsustainable, too. We could face easy-to-manufacture pathogens and other potent means of destruction without sufficient technology to defend against them… If we stayed stuck at this unsustainable level for long enough, such a catastrophe would be essentially inevitable. To safeguard civilisation, we therefore need to make sure we get beyond that unsustainable level and reach a point where we have the technology to effectively defend against such catastrophic risks… The idea of sustainability is often associated with trying to slow down economic growth. But if a given level of technological advancement is unsustainable, then that is not an option. We may be like a climber scaling a sheer cliff face with no ropes or harness, with a significant risk of falling. In such a situation, staying still is no solution; that would just wear us out, and we would fall eventually. Instead, we need to keep on climbing: only once we have reached the summit will we be safe.?
• From 1870 to 1970, there were extraordinary advances made in a wide number of different industries. This included information and communication technologies such as the telephone, radio, and television, but it also included advances in many other industries, such as transportation, energy, housing, and medicine. Since 1970, there’s been substantial progress in information and communication technologies, but in all those other indus-tries, progress has been comparatively incremental. Since 1970, the pace of progress seems to have slowed.
• You might think it’s obvious that the vast majority of people have lives with net positive wellbeing. But we are extremely unrepresentative of the world as a whole, and if you’re reading this book, you probably are, too. More than half the people in the world live on less than seven dollars per day, and that figure already accounts for the fact that money goes so much further in poor countries: it represents the equivalent of what seven dollars would buy in the United States?… Moreover, average human wellbeing has not increased inexorably upwards throughout all of human history. While living standards today are undoubtedly much higher than they were in preindustrial agricultural societies, our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors, from the dawn of Homo sapiens up until the agricultural revolution around ten thousand years ago, probably had higher average wellbeing than early agriculturalists. As people relied more on agriculture, their height a good indicator of nutrition and health-usually declined compared to that of their hunter-gatherer ancestors.
• The overall conclusion of the book is that, out of the hundreds of thousands of years in humanity’s past and the potentially billions of years in her future, we find ourselves living now, at a time of extraordinary change. A time marked by the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with thousands of nuclear warheads standing ready to fire. A time when we are burning through our finite fossil fuel reserves, producing pollution that might last hundreds of thousands of years. A time when we can see catastrophes on the horizon from engineered pathogens to value lock-in to technological stagnation and can act to prevent them… This is a time when we can be pivotal in steering the future onto a better trajectory. There’s no better time for a movement that will stand up, not just for our generation or even our children’s generation, but for all those who are yet to come.