What We Owe the Future

It’s the first time I’ve been challenged to think about the future not in decades but actually thousands of millennia. It provides great frameworks on how to think about problems and impact in a very different multi generation scale while also making it tangible enough to not sound ludicrous.

I originally went to a bookshop to buy this as I'd seen it advertised on billboards and it looked very interesting. When they didn't have it I came to Amazon and was offered a £5 promotion on this item which was already 25% off of the RRP, essentially saving me 50% of what I would've ended up paying. The book had me hooked pre-chapter 1. The ideas in the introduction made me know I would be in for a wild one. I don't generally find myself gravitating towards non-fiction but this is a must even if you're the slightest bit tempted. A real eye opener and a fascinating look into the world we live in and the passion of someone in a very different field to myself.

Absolute bargain that this great book is 99p on kindle today. Get it. This is a book that really could shape our future. You won't perhaps agree with everything in it, but the questions and topics it raises are important and thought provoking. And the larger idea that our future could be great happy and positive in tangible ways is important. Optimism drives us forward. This fascinating yet non-fiction and non-gloomy well written book is a deeply interesting book whatever country you're in. The book is about us all on Earth and it's about what our future could be like. Our future could be great beyond belief and yet predictably charted as likely to be that great by wise use of technology and resources. Clearly that's contingent on politics and business deciding we deserve a great future, but it could happen. Goodness knows we've had a lot of wake-up calls to abandon bad politicians and bad political systems so politics and business might be much better in some countries in the nearish future. We also feel after the pandemic we deserve a great future. It could happen. And by describing a possible great future, this book might help that future happen.

This book deals with lomgtermism – the far away future beyond the hopes, dreams and fears which inhabit our personal future. The unborn billions of humans have no say in our lives - they can't vote or consume yet their good or bad fortune is critically dependent on many decisions we make today e.g. about climate change, the use of nuclear or biological weapons, the environment, artificial intelligence and moral values. Wrong decisions we make in the present may destroy or warp this long-term future for all or some of the creatures who will live on our planet. William MacAskill, the author of the book is a philosopher who makes a moral case for us to care about the long term future. He outlines the dangers we need to avoid in order to have a good long term future and the tools we can use to make decisions in conditions of uncertainty. Finally, he makes recommendations about what each of us can do to ensure a better future. First of all, he argues that future people matter just like we do -and if saving lots of lives is important, the unborn billions must be considered. In our hearts, we know he is right – if our grandchildren are to live a good life , why not their grandchildren and so on? The future is big and beyond our comprehension . We may not understand just how different it could be from our world today - but ensuring that there will be a future should be a top priority. MacAskill,writes "longtermism is the idea that positively influencing this longterm future is a key moral priority of our time." He is very convincing in examining the threats to our civilization from the lock-in of despotic or totalitarian ideas especially following a takeover by intelligent robots, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems that surpass us in intelligence and then eliminate us. On the other hand stagnation in technological progress at an unsustainable level might leave us vulnerable to other disasters and catastrophes. We are living in a highly interconnected society with rapid economic and technological growth , unprecedented in human history. MacAskill says we need to use this pivotal period of high plasticity to experiment and diversify so we can discover the values and ways of living best suited to a good future. He believes that even in a worst case scenario of global nuclear war , our civilization and our scientific and agricultural knowledge would not be completely eradicated. I appreciate that It is difficult to start a new field of study like “longtermism” and I was very curious about this book, but after reading it I was disappointed. Having rightly pointed out the difficulty of grasping the “unknown unknowns’ in our future, MacAskill resorts to the misuse of a formula for expected outcomes to try and guess probabilities of very uncertain events like whether we can achieve AGI in this century, He also treats us to a chapter...

In this book, William MacAskill raises a basic moral question: we don't consider "this person is not in front of me" as a reason to disregard people morally. Nor do we consider "this action will cause harm to people later rather than immediately" as a good reason to disregard people morally. So why do we basically act as if people far in the future are irrelevant to our moral calculations? MacAskill takes seriously the possibility that there *won't* be any humans in the future--this is called "existential risk," and there is plenty to worry about (engineered pathogens, nuclear war, AI takeover, climate catastrophe) etc. However, he argues that--if we can survive these existential risks--there's good reason to believe that there will be more humans ahead of us than you can imagine. He points out that if humans last as long as the typical mammal species, 1 million years, then our future as a species (700,000 years) is more than twice our history (300,000). This would lead to 80 trillion future humans, at current population rates. (In contrast, since most of our history as a species was at the low population density of hunter-gathers, only about 100 billion humans have lived so far--the vast majority in the last century.) That means, if we're a typical mammal species, 99.5% of human life-years are ahead of us a species, not behind us. MacAskill asks a simple question: shouldn't we care about these people and the quality of their lives morally? It's obvious (to doom-and-gloom people like myself, at least) that humanity could last dramatically shorter than other mammals (I would point out that kangaroos and rabbits don't create nuclear weapons, bioweapons, or AI). But MacAskill points out it's also possible our civilization could last dramatically longer (nor do kangaroos or rabbits have the possibility of colonizing space and spawning multiple civilizations). If we do take to space and last millions of years, the number of human lives ahead of us grows to levels beyond comprehension. MacAskill's book keeps posing a simple question: shouldn't we care for their well-being? He then provides clear guidance for *how* you can best care for their well-being, after he convinces you that you *should* care. MacAskill's book is filled with things that you've never thought about, but that seem obvious once he points them out. Have you thought that there might be trillions of humans in the future? I hadn't--and yet he makes this point seem obvious in just a few pages in the Intro. And here's another thing that seems obvious once he says it. With regards to future humans, MacAskill argues: "humanity today is like an imprudent teenager: most of our life is ahead of us, and decisions that impact the rest of that life are of colossal importance. But, really, this analogy understates my case. A teenager knows approximately how...