EA - What We Owe The Future: A review and summary of what I learned by Michael Townsend

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What We Owe The Future: A review and summary of what I learned, published by Michael Townsend on August 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Will MacAskill’s new book, What We Owe The Future has just been released in the US and will be available in the UK from September 1. You might already be turning to book reviews or podcasts to inform whether you should buy a copy. To help, I’m writing a quick summary of the book, sharing three new insights I gained, and three questions it left me asking. But it’s worth being upfront to the reader about where I sit. MacAskill entwines rigorous arguments with compelling metaphors to promote a profoundly important idea: we can make the future go better, and we should. It’s filled with rich, relevant and persuasive historical examples, grounding his philosophical arguments in the real world. It’s a book for people who are curious to learn, but also motivated to act — I strongly recommend it. Summary of What We Owe The Future Main argument The book makes a case for longtermism, the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. The overarching argument is simple: Future people matter. The future could be enormously valuable (or terrible). We can positively influence the long-term future. 1. Future people matter The book argues for the first claim at the outset in straightforward and intuitive terms, but MacAskill also takes the reader through rigorous arguments grappling with population ethics, the area of philosophy that focuses on these sorts of questions. 2. The future could be enormously valuable (or terrible) MacAskill’s argument for the second claim is that there are far more people who could potentially live in the future than have ever lived in the past. On certain assumptions about the average future population and expected lifespan of the human species, the number of people who could live in the future dramatically outweighs the number of people who have ever lived. This kind of analysis may have inspired Our World In Data’s visualisation of how vast the long-term future could be. I recommend Kurzgesagt's “The Last Human — A Glimpse Into The Far Future” which evocatively draws out the potential magnitude of our long-term future. A substantial amount is at stake: if the future goes well, it could be enormously valuable, but if it doesn’t, it could be terrible. 3. We can positively influence the long-term future The third claim is the central focus of the book. MacAskill aims not just to argue that we can in principle influence the long-term future (which is the standard of most philosophical arguments) but that we can and here’s how (the standard for those who want to take action). MacAskill argues that one of the best ways to focus on the long-term future is to reduce our risk of extinction. Though he also argues that it’s not just about whether we survive; it’s also about how we survive. The case for focusing on the ways we can improve the quality of the long-term future is one of the key lessons I took from the book. Things I learned from reading What We Owe The Future Much of what I read was new to me, even as someone who’s been highly engaged with these ideas. If I were to list all the historical examples that were new to me, I’d essentially be rewriting the book. Instead, here are the top three lessons I learned. Lesson one: Today’s values could have easily been different. One of the book’s key ideas is that if we could re-run history again, it’s unlikely we’d end up with the same values — instead, they’re contingent. This is not something I believed before reading the book. If I can make a personal confession: I’m a (perhaps naive) supporter of a philosophical view called hedonistic-utilitarianism, which claims the best actions are those that increase the total amount o...