Week 5 - What could the future hold? And why care?

What We Ow the Future, Chapter 1

Longtermism is about giving recognition to the disempowered, similarly to civil rights movement.

To overcome the tyranny of the present, over the future.

To apply longtermism ask this: 'Will this be of benefit to the seventh generation ahead?'

Main Principles of Longtermism

• Future people count morally

  • e.g., Suppose while hiking, I drop a glass bottle on the trail and it shatters. And suppose that if I don’t clean it up, later a child will cut herself badly on the shards. In deciding whether to clean it up, does it matter when the child will cut herself? Should I care whether it’s a week, or a decade, or a century from now? No. Harm is harm, whenever it occurs.

  • Ask yourself if your ancestors should have positively influenced about providing a good future to you

  • Examples of current longtermism concern

    • e.g., nuclear waste disposal, climate change prevention, longterm scientific projects, preserve paintings, traditions, languages

• Scale is big. There could be a lot of them.

  • If you could save someone you should.

  • If you could save more, you should.

  • Scale of Future Humans

    • Variables

      • Time: next million years (average live time of a species)

      • Population: Same as currently (2023)

    • Result

      • 80 trillion people yet to come

      • Future 10,000 : 1 Present

• Solvability. We can make their lives go better.

  • Future can either improve or deteriorate

    • Past Improvements

      • Average life expectancy from 30 -> 73a

      • Extreme poverty 80% -> <10%

      • Literacy Rate 10% -> 85%

      • Rights Movement -> Feminism, Sexual Orientation, Slavery

      • Democracy: No Democracy -> >50%

    • Future Potential of Deterioration

      • Climate Catastrophe, Farmed Animal Suffering, Slavery, Totalitarian Regimes, Scientific advances used negatively e.g., nuclear war, factory farms

  • Now is a good time to positively influence the future

    • Connectedness

      • Past: impossible to communicate between continents

      • Now: easy

      • Future: Spreading to the stars may cause difficulties to communicate

    • Power Centralisation

      • few people hold much power to influence the future

    • Technological Shifts

      • away from bad values and survival

Causes of Neglect of Longtermism

• Not on social media - Cannot voice their opinion

• Not within politics - cannot vote or lobby

• Not within the economic market - cannot trade

Why I find longtermism hard, and what keeps me motivated

Figuring out how to motivate ourselves to do important work even when it doesn’t feel emotionally compelling

Preferring Now

• Hard to deal with there being visible and preventable suffering that I’m not doing anything to combat

  • Now vs Future

    • if we don’t take actions to improve the future, there are others coming after us who can. By contrast, if we don’t take action to help today’s global poor, those coming after us cannot step in and take our place. The lives we fail to save this year are certain to be lost and grieved for

  • Local vs Global

Speculation

• I just have to place a bet on being able to make a big positive difference, even though I know it might not work

• feel uncomfortably like gambling with the lives of others

Facilitators for peace of mind

• Community

  • Working in a team

• Intuition vs Reasoned

  • Debate with others

  • clear understanding of our emotions in order to distinguish between feelings and beliefs we endorse and those that we wouldn’t — on reflection — want to act on

• Portfolio Donations

  • Emotionally fulfilling and rationally fulfilling

• Imagination of Future well-being/suffering to make it more emotionally 'real'

  • I care about people in the future, just like I care about people now

Why I am probably not a longtermist

I am much more interested in making the future good, as opposed to long or big, as I neither think the world is great now nor am convinced it will be in the future

• Yes

  • Care about handing the world off in a good state to future generations

  • Care about people’s wellbeing regardless of when it happens

  • Give the values of people who are suffering the most more weight

  • Pessimism

    • World now is not good

      • Not everyone had as good a quality of life as my current self

    • Humanity is not awesome

      • e.g., committing genocides, letting millions of people die of hunger, enslaving and torturing people as well as billions of factory-farmed animals

    • Future world will be better

      • seeing the world as improving is dependent on a worldview with pretty uncommon values

• Not so much

  • The future could be very long

    • I do not see how this is possible without at least soft totalitarianism, which brings its own risks of reducing the value of the future.

  • That it is good bringing happy people into existence who would not have existed otherwise

  • not too fussed about humanity’s failure to become much bigger and spread to the stars

  • not extremely concerned about the lost potential from extinction risks

  • The ability to influence the long-term future

    • unconvinced that people can reliably have a positive impact which dissipates further into the future than 100 years

    • Only if we have the ability to prevent or shape a “lock-in” scenario within this timeframe

This Can't Go On

We live in a remarkable century, not just a remarkable era.

Perspective: Business As Usual

• used to the world economy growing a few percent per year

• In terms of day-to-day life, 2019 was pretty similar to 2018, noticeably but not hugely different from 2010, and hugely but not crazily different from 1980.⁴

• 

Perspective: This Can't Go On

• one with a more turbulent past and a more uncertain future

• 
• 

Possible Futures

• Stagnation

  • we'll reach the economy's "maximum size" and growth will essentially stop.

  • We'll all be concerned with how to divide up the resources we have, and the days of a growing pie and a dynamic economy will be over forever.

• Explosion

  • growth will accelerate further, to the point where the world economy is doubling every year, or week, or hour.

  • A Duplicator-like technology (such as digital people or, as I’ll discuss in future pieces, advanced AI) could drive growth like this. If this happens, everything will be changing far faster than humans can process it.

• Collapse

  • a global catastrophe will bring civilization to its knees, or wipe out humanity entirely, and we'll never reach today's level of growth again.

  • A global catastrophe could cut civilization down to a state where it never regains today's level of growth. Human extinction would be an extreme version of such a collapse

Invitation of a Balance of Perspectives

• Good to have Business as Usual

  • thinking about how to make the world better if we basically assume a stable, regular background rate of economic growth for the foreseeable future.

• Good to have This Can't Go On

  • Thinking about the ramifications of stagnation, explosion or collapse - and whether our actions could change which of those happens.

• Necessity to increase This Can't Go On

  • almost all news and analysis living in the Business As Usual headspace

Superforecasting in a nutshell

Is it possible to produce reliable, accurate forecasts for such questions?

• How likely it is that an innovative new product will succeed

• China will invade Taiwan in the next decade,

• global pandemic will sweep the world

Why use it?

• any question for which you can’t just use “predictive analytics"

  • don’t have a giant dataset you can plug into some statistical models like (say) Amazon can when predicting when your package will arrive

How? Prediction markets

• measure forecasting accuracy

  • Who does it?

    • e.g., hedge funds

  • Who doesn't?

    • e.g., US intelligence community or philanthropy

• identify the people who are consistently more accurate than everyone else

  • e.g., top 0.1% for accuracy, for multiple years in a row

• pose your forecasting questions to the superforecasters, and use an aggregate of their predictions

Does it work well?

• US intelligence community tested this method

  1. very well-calibrated

     1. in the sense that forecasts made with 20% confidence came true 20% of the time, forecasts made with 80% confidence came true 80% of the time, and so on.

     2. The method is not a crystal ball; it can’t tell you for sure whether China will invade Taiwan in the next decade

        1. but if it tells you there’s a 10% chance, then you can be pretty confident the odds really are pretty close to 10%, and decide what policy is appropriate given that level of risk.

  2. This method produced forecasts that were far more accurate than those of a typical forecaster or other approaches that were tried, and ~30% more accurate than intelligence community analysts who had access to expensively-collected classified information and years of training in the geopolitical issues they were making forecasts about

How is it used?

• Organizations contract superforecasters

  • Open Philanthropy has commissioned forecasts from all three in the past couple years

Top open Metaculus forecasts

Longtermism and animal advocacy

Objective

• Sufficient concern for nonhuman sentient beings is a key ingredient in how well the long-term future will go

• values of (powerful) people are arguably the most fundamental determinant of how the future will go

Benefit

• What hope is there of a good long-term future (for all sentient beings) as long as people think it is right to disregard the interests of animals (often for frivolous reasons like the taste of meat)?

Differences of Longterm Animal Advocacy

• it’s about achieving lasting change, locking in persistent moral consideration of nonhuman sentient beings.

  • jeopardize our long-term influence is by triggering a serious (and permanent) backlash, so we should take reasonable steps to prevent the movement from becoming too controversial.

  • movement is thoughtful and open-minded.

    • movement eventually encompasses all sentient beings – including invertebrates, wild animals, and potentially artificial minds

• Other factors become less important from a longtermist point of view.

  • The immediate alleviation of harm by, say, implementing an animal welfare reform in 2025 rather than 2030, is less imperative from this perspective