Favorite Quotes from “What We Owe The Future” by William MacAskill

Chapter 1: The Case for Longtermism

• “Despite how overwhelming thoughts of our future can be, if we truly care about the interests of future generations—if we recognize that they are real people, capable of happiness and suffering just like us—then we have a duty to consider how we might impact the world they inhabit.” (p. 19)

• “On such a scale, if we anchor our sense of humanity’s potential to a fixed-up version of our present world, we risk dramatically underestimating just how good like in the future could be.” (p. 21)

• “Decarbonization is a proof of concept for longtermism. Clean energy innovation is so robustly good, and there is so much still to do in that area that I see it as a baseline longtermist activity against which other potential actions can be compared. It sets a high bar.” (p. 25)

Chapter 2: You Can Shape the Course of History

• “Improving our trajectory would be more important than ensuring survival.” (p. 36)

Chapter 3: Moral Change

• “The existence of evolutionary idiosyncrasies, like the elephant’s trunk of the giraffe’s neck, gives some evidence for contingency in evolution; if evolution were consistently convergent across a wide variety of environments, we would expect these traits to have evolved more than once.” (p. 56)

• “Entrenchment of values creates multiple equilibria because there is a significant element of chance in which values system becomes most powerful at a particular place and time, and because, once a value system has become sufficiently powerful, it can stay that way by suppressing the competition. Moreover, the theory of cultural evolution helps to explain

  why

  the predominant cultures in society tend to entrench themselves. Simply: those cultures that do not entrench themselves in this way are, over time, more likely to die off than those that do.” (p. 60)

• “But either way, it was the actions of thinkers, writers, politicians, formerly enslaved activists, and enslaved rebels who together brought about the end of slavery. On either of these views, abolition was not preordained, and had history gone differently, the modern world could be one with widespread, legally permitted slavery.” (p. 70)

• “’The eventual goal should always be to sit down and negotiate with the so-called enemy and build solutions together,’ she told me.

  Direct action and campaigns are important tacts for drawing attention to issues...But they should be designed to lead to conversations, collaboration, and negotiations, not destruction of the enemy.

  Revolutionary behavior; cooperatives behavior.” (p. 73)

Chapter 4: Value Lock-In

• “They [Confucians] likened cultivating your character to craftsmanship: cutting bone, carving a piece of horn, or polishing a piece of jade.” (p. 75)

• “When we look at history, we see that the predominant culture in a society tends to entrench itself, eliminate the competition, and take steps to replicate itself over time. Indeed many moral views regard their own lock-in as desirable.” (p. 84)

• “To avoid such disempowerment, people would need to ensure that the AIs did what their operators wanted them to do. This is known as the ‘alignment’ problem. It’s discussed at length in other excellent books, like Superintelligence, Stuart Russell’s Human Compatible, and Brian Christian’s The Alignment Problem, so I won’t go into it in depth here.” (p. 87)

• “Conquest is the most dramatic pathway by which a single value system can become globally dominant, and it may well be the most likely.” (p. 92)

• “…in order to maintain global influence, the United States should radically increase immigration, aiming to have a population of one billion people.” (p. 93)

• “If the world converged on a single value system, there would be much less pressure for those values to change over time.” (p. 95)

• “The members of the Homo genus that went extinct soon after Homo sapiens entered their terrain included the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, Homo luzonensis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo floresiensis. Now that all the other Homo species are extinct, there’s essentially no chance that they will be resurrected and take over the world.” (p. 95)

• “How should we weigh the promotion of happiness against the alleviation of suffering? How should we handle uncertainty about the impact of our actions. especially when it comes to tiny probabilities of enormous payoffs? How should we act when we know we don’t know what the right thing to do it?” (p. 98)

• “The lock-in paradox thus resembles the familiar paradox of tolerance—the necessity for liberal societies to depend themselves against intolerant views that would undermine their freedom, even if doing so requires curtailing the very tolerance they want to preserve.” (p. 101)

Chapter 5: Extinction

• “Many extinction risk specialists consider engineered pandemics the second most likely cause of our demise this century, just behind artificial intelligence.” (p. 113)

• “If the galaxy is so vast and so old, why is not teeming with aliens?” (p. 118)

• “Moreover, if some step in our evolutionary history was extremely improbable, there might be no other highly intelligent life elsewhere in the affectable universe, and there might never be. If this is true, then our actions are of cosmic significance.” (p. 119)

Chapter 6: Collapse

• “I’ll use the term ‘civilizational collapse’ to refer to an event in which society loses the ability to create most industrial and post industrial technology. If there’s a good chance that such a collapse would be permanent, than the risk of civilizational collapse could be of even greater term importance than the risk of extinction. So let’s ask: how likely is it that some non-extinction catastrophe could cause civilization to collapse, and if it did, how likely would recovery be?” (p. 124)

• “The population of Hiroshima returned to its pre-destruction level within a decade. Today, it is a thriving modern city of 1.2 million people.” (p. 126)

• “Sometimes people claim that, because the modern world is so complex and inter-reliant, it is therefore fragile, and if one strut is lost, the entire structure will fall in a domino effect. But this idea neglects people’s astonishing grit, adaptability and ingenuity in the face of adversity.” (p. 127)

• “On a date night with her partner, they created a plan for what to do if an apocalypse occurred, including where to meet if all communications infrastructure was down. I found this strangely romantic.” (p. 130)

• “All in all, my best guess is that we will phase out most fossil fuel burning this century. However, depending on what happens with relevant technological progress, I still think there is a significant chance that we will continue to burn coal and other fossil fuels for a long time. If so, we would use up a resource that might be crucial for recovery after the collapse of civilization.” (p. 141)

Chapter 7: Stagnation

• “Over the past century, we’ve seen relatively steady, though slowing, technological progress. Sustaining this process is the result of a balancing act: every year, further progress gets harder, but every year we exponential increase the number of researchers and engineers.” (p. 152)

• “It’s not just that world population will stop growing. Rather, the world might well be headed for an exponentially declining population. As fertility rates are dropping everywhere, they aren’t stopping at replacement rates—a bit above two children per women—but are falling even lower below replacement.” (p. 155)

• “When the economy is growing, everyone can be better off than they were in the past. This means, Friedman argues, that citizens will worry less about how their life compares to the lives of people around them and will be more supportive of generous, open and tolerant social policies. And if you look at the historical record, he claims, countries tend to make moral progress—becoming fairer, more open and more egalitarian—during higher-growth periods, and they tend to morally regress during periods of stagnation.” (p. 160)

• “We can steer civilization onto a better trajectory by delaying the point of value lock-in or by improving the vales that guide the future. And we can ensure that we have a future at all by reducing the risks of extinction, collapse, and technological stagnation.” (p. 163)

Chapter 8: Is It Good to Make Happy People?

• “The authors of the study found that people, on average, think that it’s a good thing to bring a new happy person into existence and that it’s a bad thing to bring a new unhappy person into existence. Moreover, these judgements were symmetrical: the experimental subjects were just as positive about the idea of bringing into existence a new happy person as they were negative about the idea of bringing into existence a new unhappy person. That is, those surveyed did not have the intuition of neutrality.” (p. 173)

• “Ending fossil fuel subsidies makes the future better. But it does so by creating a population that is made up of completely different people than the population that would have existed otherwise. Adding new people, then, cannot be a neutral matter.” (p. 176)

• “And so on: we could keep iterating this process over and over, making people’s average wellbeing a little bit lower in exchange for making the population larger.” (p. 184)

• “To this, the critical level view adds the idea that it’s bad to bring into existence a life that has positive wellbeing but is not very good.” (p. 185)

Chapter 9: Will the Future Be Good or Bad?

• “If you lived through the lives of all conscious beings, you would then experience a hundred billion trillion years of sentience. You would spend nearly 80 percent of your time as a fish.” (p. 191)

• “In this view, your live going well is about getting what you want, even if that does not impact your conscious experiences in any way. For example, you might have a preferences for your partner to be faithful to you, even in situations where you would never know either way.” (p. 195)

• “For instance, a study subject might say that thirty minutes of an activity they’d rather skip—say, housework—was worth fifteen minutes of an enjoyable experience—say, dinner with friends. This would indicate that, for this study subject, having dinner with friends is twice as good per minute as doing housework is bad.” (p. 198)

• “In 2016, Apple was the consumer brand that best predicted whether a purchaser was rich and well educated (in 1992, the brand that best predicted income was Grey Poupon mustard).” (p. 198)

• “Do you think that your life to date has involved more happiness than suffering? Ignoring any effects of your life on other people, would you prefer to be alive or would you prefer to have never been born? If you could live the exact same life again from beginning (without remembering anything from before, so you would experience everything as if for the first time), would you do it? Assume this decision affects no one else and you are just deciding for you own benefit.” (p. 199)

• “Some possibilities that many people find compelling, in addition to great art and the natural environment, are democracy, equality, the spread of knowledge and great human accomplishments.” (p. 214)

• “The more people there are and the higher living standards are, the more likely it is that there will be individuals, like Usain Bolt, Margaret Atwood, or Maryam Mirzakhani, who go on to achieve great things.” (p. 215)

Chapter 10: What to Do

• “We can see the present and the past; they are laid out before us. We can therefore have direct knowledge of them in a way we can’t know the future—anything we know or believe about the future is based on inference from what we have experienced in the present or the past. The implicit philosophy is that, when making plans for the future, we should take much the same attitude as if we were walking backwards into unknown terrain.” (p. 224)

• “The suggestion, implicit or explicit, is that if you care about animal welfare, the most important thing is to become vegetarian; if you care about climate change, the most important thing is to fly less and drive less; if you care about resource overuse, the most important thing is to recycle and stop using plastic bags. By and large, I think that this emphasis, though understandable, is a major strategic blunder for those of us who want to make the world better. Often the focus on consumption decisions is accompanied by a failure to prioritize.” (p. 231)

• “The most powerful yet simple reason is this: our consumption is not optimized for doing hard, and so by making different consumptions choices we can avoid at most the modest amount of harm we’d be otherwise causing: by contrast, when donating we can choose whichever action best reduces the harm we are about.” (p. 233)

• “Ask yourself, Hoe much do you think your personality, values, and preferences will change over the next decade? Now ask, How much did they change over the previous decade? Intuitively, I thought they wouldn’t change much over the next decade, but at the same time I think they changed a lot over the previous decade, which seem inconsistent. Surveys find similar results, which suggests that people tend to underestimate just how much they will chance in the future.” (p. 236)

• “For many, people, I think it would be reasonable to spend 5 percent to 15 percent of their career learning and exploring their options, which works out to two to six years.” (p. 257)

• “For similar reasons, one should strive to be a good friend and family member and citizen, to act kindly, and to cultivate a habit of cooperation—even if, in any given situation, it is not clear why this would lead to the best possible outcome. In these ways, I see longtermism as a supplement to commonsense morality, not a replacement for it.” (p. 241)

• “But we should not be complacent. There are enormous challenges ahead. We need to decarbonize the economy over the next fifty years, even as energy demand triples. We need to reduce the risks of war between great powers, of the use of engineered pathogens, and of AI-assisted perpetual global totalitarianism. And at the same time, we need to ensure that the engine of technological progress keeps running.” (p. 244)