What We Owe The Future

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It took me a while to put my finger on what was so irritating about this book, but there’s a patronising glibness about it, and it is positively jammed full of the sort of thought experiments (imagine you had to live the life of every sentient being on the planet kind of thing) that give philosophy undergraduates a bad name.

William MacAskill is, as best as I can make out, barely out of undergraduate philosophy class, still hasn’t left the university, and strikes me as a singularly unlikely person to be dispensing cosmic advice for the planet’s distant future.

But ultimately it is the sub-Sagan, sub-Harari style of wiser-than-thou top-down moral counselling that really grates: we (us clever people) need to solve the problems of the future centrally and this requires brainy people in the academy, like me, to do it. And the answer might be at the great expense of all you stupid nose-breathing oxygen wasters out there.

Thanks — but no thanks.

It is not at all clear that we can do anything to influence the distance future (expected value? Like, seriously? Are we rolling dice here?), nor why organisms now should care for the future of their species in 500 million years which, if it survives, will have doubtlessly evolved beyond all recognition.

Quick side bar: Probabilities are suitable for closed, bounded systems with a complete set of known outcomes. The probability of rolling a six is ⅙ because a die has six equal sides, is equally likely to land on any side, and must land on one, and no other outcome is possible. This is not how most things in life work. Probabilities work for finite games. The future is in no sense a finite game. It is unbounded, ambiguous, incomplete, the range of possible outcomes are not known and may as well be infinite. You can't calculate probabilities about it. Gerd Gigerenzer would say it is a situation of uncertainty, not risk. Expectation theory is worthless.

This demolishes MacAskill’s foundational premise — that “expectation theory” is relevant — and is enough to trash the book’s thesis in toto. But it is fun to carry on.

Does this self-sacrifice for the hereafter also apply to non-sapient beasts, fish and fowls, too? Bushes and trees? If not, why not?

If homo sapiens really is as hopeless a case as MacAskill thinks, who is to say it can redeem itself millennia into the future? What makes Macaskill think future us deserves that chance that present us is blowing so badly? Perhaps it would be better off for everyone else said saintly beasts, fish fowls, bushes and trees) if we just winked out now.

If you want sensible and thoughtful writing about the planet and its long term future, try Stewart Brand and Brian Eno and the good folk of the Long Now Foundation. Give this hokum the swerve.