What We Owe the Future is a fantastic introduction into the philosophical concept of longtermism, the idea that we should invest more time and energy into the long-term future of humanity, and what we can do to ensure that the future is as positive as we can make it.
The issues facing the future are legion, some listed in the book include disasters such as new global pandemics or nuclear war, climate change (duh), or the most disconcerting concept in the book for me, authoritarians using carefully engineered artificial intelligence to cement their form of government and their values in perpetuity. Longtermism asserts that we all have the moral duty to try and predict the existential issues facing the future (as difficult as that may be) and to either mitigate these existential issues or give the future the tools to deal with them.
I absolutely loved What We Owe the Future. It manages both to explain some very complex concepts while at the same time being not only readable but engaging. Once I started reading this book, I didn’t want to put it down. Just as importantly I think MacAskill strikes a careful balance between optimism and pessimism towards the future. Often times discussions of humanity’s long-term future devolve into two camps either “All is folly” or “Everything will be splendid, and we have literally nothing to worry about,” (If I’m being honest, I gravitate more towards the former). I believe both attitudes are dangerous for different reasons. Pessimism can quickly turn to apathy, with a pessimist asking themselves why they should bother to help make the future better if everything is pointless anyway. Optimism on the other hand could engender complacency, an optimist could think to themselves “I don’t have to do anything because everything will work itself out in the long run.”
The longtermist philosophy reminds me of the name of a political organization in France in the 1820s, it was called “Help Yourself, and Heaven will Help You Club.” I think that in a nutshell is what longtermism is about, if you want the future to be better, then you need to work to make is so.
What We Owe the Future also reminds us how much our actions will impact the long-term future. People fail to grasp just how much events in the present will send aftershocks long into the future. And I’m not just talking about carbon dioxide emissions lingering in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. We are living in the present moment neck deep in the consequences of decisions made by people in the past. The book The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, & Politics had a great quote from a Guatemalan author that captures this idea in a cynical (but I think accurate) way, “The future is the past’s garbage.” If we follow the advice of What We Owe the Future, then we should work to make sure that the future isn’t garbage.
If You’re Interested in the book here are some links for it:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/59802037-what-we-owe-the-futurehttps://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/what-we-owe-the-future-william-macaskill/1140658116