What We Owe the Future summary

One sunny spring day, you’re hiking through a vibrant forest. While on the trail, you accidentally drop a glass bottle and it shatters. Suppose that if you leave the glass there, a child will at some point cut herself badly on it. You need to decide whether to clean it up. When making the decision, does it matter when exactly the child will injure herself? If it’s a week, a decade, or even a century from now, does your mind change? Of course not. A hurt child is a hurt child, no matter when she’s hurt.

As this simple thought experiment shows, future people count. They’re people –⁠ people who will have pain, joy, and dreams, just like the rest of us. The only difference is that they don’t exist yet.

This is one of the ideas behind longtermism: the idea that future people deserve our consideration and our effort. And that’s what these Blinks are all about.

In today’s world, it seems obvious that slavery is abominable and unacceptable. Yet it was practiced in most cultures, in most places, at most times throughout history. 

Given this, the abolition of slavery is actually quite mysterious. It was historically ubiquitous, economically profitable, had lasted for ages, and was defended by influential people. Yet slavery was indeed abolished, first by Britain and by other countries thereafter. Was this just the inevitable result of moral progress? 

The author argues that many specific events and factors probably made abolition more likely. These include the activism of a small number of Quakers, a religious group from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first organization in history to conduct an abolition campaign, their activism inspired a generation of influential British abolitionists. 

Looked at this way, abolitionism occurred at a crucial moment in which multiple moral puzzle pieces all lined up. The moral beliefs of the world could easily have been very different than the ones we know today, and slavery could have still existed across the globe. 

From a longtermist perspective, changing society’s values is incredibly important. More specifically, being able to change them is important. 

Values can be highly persistent. To see this, just look at Bible sales. Despite being written over two thousand years ago, it’s the top-selling book every year, followed by the Quran. These books still influence countless political outcomes around the world. 

Because values can be so persistent, we want to avoid value lock-in: any event that causes a single value system to persist for an extremely long time. If value lock-in were to occur on a global scale, the future’s goodness or badness would largely be determined by which values got locked in. Just imagine if slavery had been part of a locked-in value system. 

Fortunately, the current state of the moral universe is a lot like molten glass. In its hot, highly malleable state, different moral views can compete to alter and influence the final shape. However, technological advances could put an end to this, as we’ll see next.

When thinking about the potential for value lock-in, one technology is particularly concerning. That’s artificial general intelligence, or AGI: a system that can learn and perform a broad range of tasks at at least the same level as humans can. 

AGI makes value lock-in a possibility for two reasons. First, AGI could potentially greatly accelerate both technological and economic growth. If a country produced increasing numbers of AI workers, its economy could grow indefinitely. Second, AGI is potentially immortal: software is easily replicated, and once created, can’t really be destroyed.

Using this technology, a person, group, or country could create skilled, intelligent, productive agents with goals closely aligned with their own. The AGI would then be able to act on and advance those goals. It could even be hard-coded to achieve a very specific future, or used to indefinitely emulate someone’s brain structure. Or all of these at once.

It’s possible, then, that someone could use AGI to stamp out competing moral views. Would they want to? Sadly, looking at history, they just might. Historically, countless religious crusades and ideological purges have sought to eliminate people holding opposing views.

Of course, we don’t know when exactly AGI will be developed. Guesses among machine-learning experts differ wildly, but the most robust forecast to date has been done by analyst Ajeya Cotra. Based on her research, Contra guesses there’s a greater than 10 percent chance of AGI developing by 2036 and a 50 percent chance by 2050. 

Even if AGI is centuries away, we should still be considering value-lock in, because whatever happens in the intervening time could affect which values eventually get locked in. If one value system is able to take hold globally, there would be little pressure for it to change over time. Its views could persist for thousands of years. With AGI, they could persist forever.

Given this, we should aim for a morally exploratory world –⁠ one in which the norms and institutions that are morally better are the ones most likely to win out over time. This will allow us to eventually converge on the best possible society.

Additionally, we should favor political experimentalism. One way to do this is by developing charter cities: autonomous communities which operate under different laws from their surrounding countries. We could have charter cities based on Marxism, environmentalism, anarchist communitarianism –⁠ you name it. These could be used to empirically determine which sets of values bring about the best society. 

Aside from value lock-in, how else might civilization end or collapse? We’ll discuss that next.

In 1994, a comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into the planet Jupiter. It did so with the force of three hundred billion tons of TNT, leaving a literally Earth-sized scar behind.

Scientists had been warning of the dangers of asteroid impacts for years. They were typically laughed off –⁠ until the Jupiter crash. After that, public interest and advocacy among the scientific community increased until Congress took action. In 1998, it launched the initiative Spaceguard, which tasked NASA with finding 90 percent of all near-Earth asteroids and comets larger than one kilometer within a decade. The initiative was a success: NASA has found more than 98 percent of the astral bodies which could threaten our extinction. Our risk of being hit by an asteroid is a hundred times lower than it was before Spaceguard.

This example shows that humanity has a real ability to mitigate existential threats, provided we take them seriously. Currently, there are much greater risks at hand than asteroids, and we must rise to the challenge of dealing with them.

One of these is the risk of an engineered pandemic –⁠ in other words, the outbreak of a disease we design ourselves using biotechnology. Engineered pathogens can be created to have dangerous combinations of characteristics: think something as lethal as Ebola and as contagious as measles. Further risks come from the fact that new pathogens could potentially be easily replicated by normal people at home, and that laboratories performing biotech work have worryingly lax safety standards. Already, confirmed lab leaks have led to breakouts of anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, and more. 

According to various estimates, the probability of extinction-level engineered pandemic this century is between 0.6 and 3 percent. But extinction isn’t the only outcome we should be concerned about. 

Would we be able to bounce back if 99 percent of people died from a pandemic or nuclear war? There’s some reason to think we would. For starters, even if most people died, physical infrastructure and machines would remain largely usable, as would libraries and digital archives containing most of our knowledge.

However, complications could arise if we don’t leave enough fossil fuel reserves in the ground. This is because, historically, fossil fuels seem critical for industrialization. When a country begins to industrialize, it almost always burns lots of coal first and then switches to oil and gas. The depletion of fossil fuels could seriously hamper our ability to recover from a collapse. 

We might be able to get some electricity out of the remaining solar and wind farms, but these degrade over just a few decades. Creating new ones would be very difficult without the help of advanced international supply chains. Plus, solar and wind can’t provide the high-temperature heat required to make cement, steel, brick, and glass. Suffice it to say that the more we deplete our fossil fuel resources, the worse off we’ll be.

Now that we’ve covered the many bad paths civilization could take, you’re probably wondering how you can help reduce existential risk.

In general, a few key rules of thumb can help guide us in our efforts to influence the long term future. The first is to take actions that are robustly good or you’re quite confident are good. Promoting innovation in clean tech is a great example that fits this rule. It helps keep fossil fuels in the ground, lessens the impact of climate change, furthers technological progress, and reduces the death toll from air pollution.

The second rule of thumb for influencing the future is to increase the number of options open to you. For instance, certain career paths open up more opportunities than others. A PhD in economics or statistics will give you more options than, say, one in philosophy.

Finally, the third rule of thumb is to keep learning more. Individually and societally, we can always continue to build our knowledge of different causes and important issues. 

Now that you’ve got general guidelines for improving the world, you should decide which specific problem you want to focus on. Here, prioritizing is essential. Like many people, you might want to choose a problem that’s close to your heart, perhaps because it affects you or a loved one. However, that cause might not have a high global impact. The highest-impact cause areas are the ones we’ve talked about in these Blinks: value lock-in, AGI, biotechnology, climate change and technological stagnation. 

After you’ve chosen the problem you think is most pressing, it’s time to take action. Again, a lot of people don’t do this in the most optimal way. For example, when people decide to promote animal welfare, many of them immediately go vegetarian, just like the author did when he was 18.

Although this type of personal action is understandable, the effects are fairly miniscule. Going vegetarian when you’re young reduces your total lifetime carbon footprint by one tenth, or about sixty-four tons of carbon over eighty years. Compare that to a one-time donation of $3,000 to the Clean Air Task Force. Estimates suggest such a donation would reduce the world’s carbon dioxide emissions by three thousand tons per year, exponentially higher than being vegetarian your entire life.

Aside from donating money, another high-impact action is political activism, the simplest form of which is voting. Although the chance that your specific vote or work toward a cause will make a measurable difference, the return can be very high if your campaign succeeds. 

Another impactful action is spreading good ideas among your family and friends. Discussion between friends is a great way to increase political participation and can motivate people to work on important issues.

The final high-impact decision is having children. Yes, it’s true that your children will produce carbon emissions. But they’ll also do lots of good things, including contributing to society, innovating, and advocating for political change. 

Having more children also reduces the risk that we’ll stagnate technologically. Stagnation is a big risk because we could develop potent destructive tools before we have ways of defending against them. We may be entering an unsustainable state in which we’re capable of bioengineering pathogens which could wipe us out without a way to mitigate the risks. 

Plus, as we progress technologically, we tend to pick the low-hanging fruit –⁠ the easiest technology to develop. Over time, finding similarly important inventions becomes harder and harder. So far, we’ve dealt with the problem by simply increasing the number of researchers, engineers, and inventors. But that trend can’t continue. Falling fertility rates mean the world population will plateau by 2100 and then exponentially decline, according to data from the UN. If the global fertility rate falls to 1.5 children per woman –⁠ the current rate in Europe –⁠ the world population will shrink from ten billion to below a hundred million within 500 years. 

Whatever you choose to do to affect the future, remember one thing: one person can make a difference. Every social and political movement throughout history was the result of combinations of individual effort. You –⁠ we –⁠ can help steer the future toward a better trajectory, for all future people yet to be born.