What We Owe The Future, William MacAskill
(back to books)
- Substrat: positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time
- wellbeing of sentient creatures is all that matters morally
- move from “How can I personally have the biggest impact?” to “Who in the community is relatively best placed to do what?”
- personal decisions with high leverage for impact: donations, political activism, spreading good ideas, having children, choice of career
- ITN framework:
- importance of problem: significance-persistence-contingency framework
- significance: average value added by new state of affairs
- persistence: how long new state of affairs lasts
- contingency: noninevitability; extent to which state of affairs depends on small number of specific actions (agriculture is not very, novel Jane Eyre is very contingent)
- tractability of problem: how many resources would it take to solve a given fraction of the problem?
- neglectedness of problem: how many resources are already going towards solving the problem (however: with less neglectedness, maybe increasing returns to effort!)
- 3 rules of thumb:
- take actions we can be comparatively confident are good
- increase the number of options open to us
- learn more
- significant problems:
- lock-in of bad values (e.g. through AGI or dominance of single world ideology)
- end of civilisation (e.g. through nuclear weapons/bioweapons, technological stagnation, depleting fossil fuel reserves, significant warming of the planet)
- past & future in perspective:
- homo sapiens ~300 k years ago, agriculture ~12 k years ago, first cities ~6 k years ago, industrial era ~250 years ago
- ~100 bio. people have ever lived, ~8 bio. alife still
- mammalians last ~1 mio. years (80 tr. people to come); earth habitable for 100s of mio. years
- today's rate of change is extraordinary & not maintainable
- in recent decades, global economig growth averaged ~3% per year
- ~0% for first 290,000 years of humanity’s existence; ~0.1% in agricultural era
- from 10,000 BC onwards, world economy doubled every few hundred years;
- most recent doubling took 19 years
- 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.
- humans & animals:
- per year 70 bn. chickens, 300 mio. cattle, 1.5 bn. pigs, 100 bn. fish killed
- 25 bn. chickens, 1.5 bn cattle, 1 bn. pigs alive at any one time
- neurons per animal: chicken = 200 mio., humans = 80 bn.
- using sum of neurons, humans > farmed animals by 30:1, fish > humans by 17:1
- consumption is not optimised for doing harm. Donation can be optimised for reducing harm.