Every year millions of people, disproportionately in poor countries, die prematurely because fossil fuel burning pollutes the air with particulates that cause lung cancer, heart disease and respiratory infections. Moving off carbon is a win-win for both the near and the long term. The same holds for preventing pandemics, controlling artificial intelligence and decreasing the risk of nuclear war.
The idea that we could affect the long-term future, and that there could be so much at stake, might just seem too wild to be true. This is how things initially seemed to me. But I think this wildness comes not from the moral premises that underlie longtermism but from the fact that we live at such an unusual time.
Our era is undergoing an unprecedented amount of change. Currently, the world economy doubles in size about every 19 years. But before the Industrial Revolution, it took hundreds of years for the world economy to double; and for hundreds of thousands of years before that, growth rates were close to zero. What's more, the current rate of growth cannot continue forever; within just 10,000 years, there would be a trillion civilizations' worth of economic output for every reachable atom.
All this indicates that we are living through a unique and precarious chapter in humanity's story. Out of the hundreds of thousands of years in humanity's past — and the potentially billions of years in its future — we find ourselves living now, at a time of extraordinary change.
A time marked by thousands of nuclear warheads standing ready to fire. A time when we are rapidly burning fossil fuels, producing pollution that might last hundreds of thousands of years. A time when we can see catastrophes on the horizon — from engineered viruses to A.I.-enabled totalitarianism — and can act to prevent them.
To be alive at such a time is both an exceptional opportunity and a profound responsibility: We can be pivotal in steering the future onto a better trajectory. There's no better time for a movement to stand up, not just for our generation or even our children's generation, but for all the generations yet to come.
William MacAskill is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the author of the forthcoming book "What We Owe the Future," from which this essay has been adapted. nyt
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The Reluctant Prophet of Effective AltruismWilliam MacAskill’s movement set out to help the global poor. Now his followers fret about runaway A.I. Have they seen our threats clearly, or lost their way?
By the time MacAskill was a graduate student in philosophy, at Oxford, Singer’s insight had become the organizing principle of his life. When he met friends at the pub, he ordered only a glass of water, which he then refilled with a can of two-per-cent lager he’d bought on the corner; for dinner, he ate bread he’d baked at home. The balance of his earnings was reserved for others. He tried not to be too showy or evangelical, but neither was he diffident about his rationale. It was a period in his life both darkly lonesome and ethically ablaze. As he put it to me recently, “I was very annoying.” (continues)
New Yorker
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