Summary of William MacAskill's What We Owe the Future

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Your life is made up of many lifetimes, lived consecutively. You experience cruelty and kindness from both sides. The modern era is rare, because it is the only time in your life when you experience such dramatic population growth.

#2 The idea of longtermism is that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time. It is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it.

#3 I now believe that the world’s long-run fate depends in part on the choices we make in our lifetimes. We can choose to improve the values that guide society, and we can carefully navigate the development of AI.

#4 If I'm right, then we have a huge responsibility. We are a small minority compared to everyone who will come after us, but we hold the entire future in our hands. We need to build a moral worldview that takes the longterm implications of our decisions seriously.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Aug 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350017151

IRB Media

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Insights on William MacAskill's What We Owe the Future

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Your life is made up of many lifetimes, lived consecutively. You experience cruelty and kindness from both sides. The modern era is rare, because it is the only time in your life when you experience such dramatic population growth.

#2

The idea of longtermism is that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time. It is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it.

#3

I now believe that the world’s long-run fate depends in part on the choices we make in our lifetimes. We can choose to improve the values that guide society, and we can carefully navigate the development of AI.

#4

If I'm right, then we have a huge responsibility. We are a small minority compared to everyone who will come after us, but we hold the entire future in our hands. We need to build a moral worldview that takes the longterm implications of our decisions seriously.

#5

Future people count, but we rarely consider them. We cannot give them political power, but we can at least give them consideration. By abandoning the tyranny of the present over the future, we can act as trustees, helping to create a flourishing world for generations to come.

#6

The idea that future people count is common sense. Future people, after all, are people. They will exist. They will have hopes and joys and pains and regrets, just like the rest of us. They just don’t exist yet.

#7

The interests of present and future people should not always be given equal weight. We often have stronger special relationships with people in the present than with people in the future. And we should consider how our actions affect the latter.

#8

The numbers of future people matter morally because the number of future people could be huge. Consider the long-run history of humanity. There have been members of the genus Homo on Earth for over 2. 5 million years. Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved around three hundred thousand years ago.

#9

The future of our species is unknown, but we can make estimates that take our uncertainty into account. If we only last as long as the typical mammalian species, there would be 80 trillion