What We Owe The Future

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They flutter behind you, your possible pasts:
Some bright-eyed and crazy,
Some frightened and lost.
A warning to anyone still in command
Of their possible future
To take care.

—Roger Waters, Your Possible Pasts

On getting out more

William MacAskill is undoubtedly intelligent, widely-read — perhaps too widely-read — and he applies his polymathic range to What We Owe The Future with some panache.

So it took me a while to put my finger on what was so irritating about his book. To be sure, there’s a glibness about it: it is jammed full of the sophomore 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.

Indeed, MacAskill, a thirty-something ethics lecturer who has divided his adult life between Oxford and Cambridge universities, is barely out of undergraduate philosophy class himself. You sense it would do him a world of good to put the books down and get some education from the school of life: pulling pints, waiting tables or labouring.

Of lived and not-yet-lived experience

William MacAskill’s premise is this: barring near-term cataclysm, there are so many more people in our future than in the present, that our duty of care to this horde of sacred unborn swamps any concern for the here and now. We must do what we can to avoid that cataclysm, and vouchsafe the future’s — well — future.

We are, thus, minding the shop not just for our children and grandchildren, but for generations not yet conceived — in any sense of the word — millennia hence. Thousands of millennia hence.

Perhaps to talk us down from our grandiosity, MacAskill spends some time remarking, rightly, on our contingency — that we happen to be the ones here to talk about the future is basically a fluke — but then neglects to appreciate that this contingency is by no means in our gift, and nor does it now stop.

For, per the second law of thermodynamics — pace dear old Roger Waters — there is just one possible past, one possible now, and an infinite array of possible futures. They stretch out into an unknown black void. Some are short, some long, some dystopian, some enlightened. Some will be cut off by apocalypse, some will fade gently into warm entropic soup.

It is as if MacAskill has got this perfectly backward. He talks about the present as if we are at some single crossroads; a one-time determining fork in the history of the planet where by our present course of action we can steer it conclusively this way or that, and that we have the wherewithal (or even the necessary information) to understand all the dynamics, all the second, third, fourth ... nth-order consequences to deliver a future appropriate for the organisms we expect to be.

But this is absurd. Literally countless determining forks happen every day, everywhere. Most of them are entirely beyond our control. Some future is assured. What it is, and who will enjoy it, is literally impossible to know. This uncertainty is a profoundly important engine of our non-zero-sum existence.

Expected value theory does not help

MacAskill uses probability theory (again: too many books, not enough common sense) and what financiers might call “linear interpolation” to deduce, from what has already happened in the world, a theory about what will happen, and what we should therefore do to accommodate the forthcoming throng. This is madness.

Probabilities are suitable for closed, bounded systems with a complete set of known outcomes. The probability when rolling dice is ⅙ because a die has six equal sides, is equally likely to land on any side, must land on one, and no other outcome is possible. This is an artificial, tight, closed system. We can only calculate an expected value because of this artificially constrained outcome. Probabilities only work for such finite games. Almost nothing in every day life works like that. The future is infinite: unbounded, ambiguous, incomplete, the range of possible outcomes are not known. You can’t calculate probabilities about it.

It is a situation of doubt, not risk. Here, expectation theory is worthless. This is a good thing.

About that thought experiment

MacAskill came to his thesis courtesy of the thought experiment mentioned above: imagine living the life of every being that has habited the planet since mitochondrial Eve up to the present day. This gives us an idea of our own utter contingency, and of the present’s microscopic insignificance in the Grand Scheme, relative to the hundred billion who have gone before and the putative trillions yet to come. Despite our insignificance we are here, disproportionately empowered to affect the future.

The idea chimes for a moment and then falls apart This, I think, gives the game away. For this is to see present existence as no more than the task of cranking the ’’right’’ handle on the cosmic machinery, to vouchsafe a calculable outcome. But it is nothing of the sort. This is as misconceived as is Richard Dawkins’ absurd idea that a fielder does, or even could, functionally calculate differential equations to catch a ball.

The thought experiment betrays is an unflinchingly deterministic world-view: the universe is a clockwork machine to be set and configured. Take readings, perform calculations, twiddle dials, progress to the designated place and hold out your hand, at the appointed time the ball fill drop into it.

This is obvious nonsense. Set in opposition to the heuristic, iterative, provisional mode of behaving that characterises any evolving organism in an ecosystem. Here it is in a nutshell, the great distinction between reductionism and pragmatism.

An infinity of possibilities

We can manufacture plausible stories about whence we came easily enough: that’s what scientists and historians do, though they have a hard time agreeing with each other. But where we are going is a different matter. We don’t have the first clue. Evolution makes no predictions. Alternative possibilities branch every which way. Over a generation or two we have some dim prospect of anticipating who our progeny might be and what they might want. Darwin’s dangerous algorithm wires us, naturally, to do this.

But over millions of years — “the average lifespan of a mammalian species” we are confidently told — the sheer volume of chaotic interactions between the co-evolving organisms, mechanisms, systems and algorithms that comprise our hypercomplex ecosystem, mean literally anything could happen. There are squillions of possible futures. Each has its own unique set of putative inheritors. How do we know to whom we owe a duty? How on earth would we frame it? Don’t we owe them all a duty? Doesn’t action to promote the interests of one branch consign infinitely more to oblivion?

Who are we to play with such cosmic dice? With what criteria? By reference to whose morality? An uncomfortable regression, through storeys of turtles and elephants, beckons. This is just the sort of thing ethics professors like, of course.

For if the grand total of unborn interests down the pathway time’s arrow eventually takes drowns out the assembled present, then those interests, in turn, are drowned out by the collected interests of those down the literally infinite number of possible pathways time’s arrow doesn’t end up taking. Who are we to judge? How do we arbitrate between our possible futures, if not by reference to our own values? In that case is this really “altruism” or just motivated selfish behaviour?

Causality may or may not be true, but still forward progress is non-linear. There is no “if-this-then-that” over five years, let alone fifty, let alone a million. Each of these gazillion branching pathways is a possible future. Only one can come true. We don’t, and can’t, know which one it will be.

And here is the rub: Amazonian butterflies causing typhoons in Manila: anything and everything we do infinitesimally and ineffably alters the calculus, re-routing evolutionary design forks and making this outcome or that more likely. Decisions that prefer one outcome surely disfavour an infinity of others.

If you take causal regularities for granted then all you need to be wise in hindsight is enough data. In this story, the causal chain behind us is unbroken back to where records begin — the probability of an event happening when it has already happened is one hundred percent; never mind that we’ve had to be quite imaginative in reconstructing it.

Brainboxes to the rescue

But ultimately it is MacAskill’s sub-Harari, wiser-than-thou, top-down moral counselling that grates: humanity needs to solve the problems of the future centrally; this requires brainy people from the academy, like MacAskill, to do it. And though the solution might be at the great expense of all you mouth-breathing oxygen wasters out there, it is for the future’s good.

We should sacrifice you lot — birds in the hand — for our far-distant descendants — birds in a bush who may or may not be there in a million years.

Thanks — but no thanks.

Why stop with humans?

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

If present homo sapiens really is such a hopelessly venal case, 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 — especially said saintly beasts, fish fowls, bushes and trees — if we just winked out now?

The FTX connection

MacAskill’s loopy Futurism appeals to the silicon valley demi-god types who have a weakness for Wagnerian psychodrama and glib a priori sci fi futurism.

Elon Musk is a fan. So, to MacAskill’s chagrin, is deluded crypto fantasist Sam Bankman-Fried. He seems to have “altruistically” given away a large portion of his investors’ money to the cause. I wonder what the expected value of that outcome was. You perhaps shouldn’t judge a book by the company it keeps on bookshelves, but still.

See the Long Now Foundation

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.

See also

• Simulation hypothesis
• Gerd Gigerenzer
• The Clock of the Long Now