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Zusammenfassung von What We Owe the Future

Name: What We Owe the Future
Rating: 4.3 (225 reviews)
Author: William MacAskill

William MacAskill

A Guide to Ethical Living for the Fate of Our Future

4.3 (225 Bewertungen)

21 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill is a thought-provoking book that challenges readers to consider how our actions today affect future generations. It offers insight into the ethical implications of our choices and provides a framework for making decisions that prioritize long-term good.

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Ethik & Moral Nachhaltigkeit Sozialphilosophie Digitale Transformation Künstliche Intelligenz

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What’s in it for me? Find out why we should do our best to create a better future.

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.

Why do future people matter?

What would you do if you knew that you were going to have to live through the full lives of every person in the future, from their birth to their death, no matter how good or bad? Would you want us, in the present, to reduce carbon emissions to increase the quality of your life? Would you want us to be careful with new technologies? Would you want us to pay attention to how our actions today impact conditions tomorrow?

Your answer to all of these questions is probably “yes.” Of course you’d want us to do our best to create a good future for you.

After all, there could be a lot of future people. And according to longtermism, we have both the obligation and the ability to improve their lives.

The amount of future people is relevant for a simple reason. If you were faced with saving one person or ten people from a burning building, all else being equal, you should save ten.

In the case of humanity, our species’ lifespan could be dizzyingly long. If we survive until Earth ceases to be habitable, in hundreds of millions of years, there could be a million future people living for every one person alive today.

All of those lives could be either flourishing or wretched –⁠ and we have influence over the outcome. Collectively, as the past two hundred years of history have shown, we have the power to improve life expectancy, reduce poverty, increase literacy, and influence all sorts of other positive trends. On the other hand, we can also create very bad outcomes, like the totalitarian regimes that arose in the twentieth century.

Of course, just as our future could be much longer, it could also be much shorter –⁠ if we cause our own extinction. Avoiding that outcome is a big part of our responsibility, and we’ll talk about it a lot in the next several sections.

Is moral progress inevitable?

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?

How can we make the future better?

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.

How might we cause human extinction or civilizational collapse?

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.

How can we safeguard the future?

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.

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Worum geht es in What We Owe the Future?

What We Owe the Future (2022) makes the case for longtermism –⁠ the idea that people today have an obligation to create a good future for successive generations. Using philosophical reasoning, historical anecdotes, and social science research, it argues that the current moment could decide whether future people will live happy, flourishing lives or extraordinarily miserable ones. By carefully considering our actions with respect to issues like AI safety, biotechnology, and value lock-in, we increase the chances that future people will thrive –⁠ just as many of us do, now, thanks to people from the past.

Wer What We Owe the Future lesen sollte

Activists and charity donors who want to maximize the good they do
People interested in moral philosophy and ethics
Anyone concerned about the future of humanity

Über den Autor

William MacAskill is a philosopher and ethicist working as an associate professor and senior research fellow at the University of Oxford. He co-founded three organizations: Giving What We Can, the Center for Effective Altruism, and 80,000 Hours, all of which aim to produce long-term social and economic impact. He is also the co-author of Moral Uncertainty, a book about decision-making, and the author of Doing Good Better, about effective altruism.

Kategorien mit What We Owe the Future

Philosophie Technologie & Zukunft

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