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This is: On future people, looking back at 21st century longtermism , published by Joe_Carlsmith on the Effective Altruism Forum.
(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)
“Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”
– Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Roughly stated, longtermism is the thesis that what happens in the long-term future is profoundly important; that we in the 21st century are in a position to have a foreseeably positive and long-lasting influence on this future (for example, by lowering the risk of human extinction and other comparable catastrophes); and that doing so should be among the key moral priorities of our time.
This post explores the possibility of considering this thesis — and in particular, a certain kind of “holy sh” reaction to its basic empirical narrative — from the perspective of future people looking back on the present day. I find a certain way of doing this a helpful intuition pump.
I. Holy sh the future
“I announce natural persons to arise,
I announce justice triumphant,
I announce uncompromising liberty and equality,
I announce the justification of candor and the justification of pride.
O thicker and faster—(So long!)
O crowding too close upon me,
I foresee too much, it means more than I thought.”
– Whitman, So Long!
I think of many precise, sober, and action-guiding forms of longtermism — especially forms focused on existential risk in particular — as driven in substantial part by a more basic kind of “holy sh” reaction, which I’ll characterize as follows:
Holy sh there could be a lot of sentient life and other important stuff happening in the future.
And it could be so amazing, and shaped by people so much wiser and more capable and more aware than we are.
Wow. That’s so crazy. That’s so much potential.
Wait, so if we mess up and go extinct, or something comparable, all that potential is destroyed? The whole thing is riding on us? On this single fragile planet, with our nukes and bioweapons and Donald Trumps and ~1.5 centuries of experience with serious technology?
Do other choices we make influence how that entire future goes?
This is wild. This is extremely important. This is a crazy time to be alive.
This sort of “holy sh” reaction responds to an underlying empirical narrative — one in which the potential size and quality of humanity’s future is (a) staggering, and (b) foreseeably at stake in our actions today.
Conservative versions of this narrative appeal to the spans of time that we might live on earth, and the number of people who might live during that time. Thus, if earth will be habitable for hundreds of millions of years, and can support some ten billion humans per century, some 10^16 humans might someday live on earth — ~a million times more than are alive today.
I’m especially interested here, though, in a less conservative version: in which our descendants eventually take to the stars, and spread out across our own galaxy, and perhaps across billions of other galaxies — with billions or even trillions of years to do, build, create, and discover what they see as worth doing, building, creating, and discovering (see Ord (2020), Chapter 8, for discussion).
Sometimes, a lower-bound on the value at stake in this sort of possibility is articulated in terms of human lives (see e.g. Bostrom (2003)). And as I wrote about last week, I think that other things equal, creating wonderful human lives is a deeply worthwhile thing to do. But I also think that talking about the value of the future in terms of such lives should just be seen as a gesture — an attempt to point, using notions of value we’re at least somewhat familiar with, at the possibility of something profoundly good occurring on cosmic scales, but which we are currently in an extremely poor position to understand or anticipa...
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