What We Owe The Future: Difference between revisions

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-{{a|book review|{{image|what we owe the future|jpg|}}}}It took me a while to put my finger on what was so irritating about this book. To be sure, there’s a patronising glibness about it: 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.
+{{a|book review|{{image|what we owe the future|jpg|}}}}{{quote|
+They flutter behind you, your possible pasts:<br>
+Some bright-eyed and crazy, <br>
+Some frightened and lost.<br>
+A warning to anyone still in command <br>
+Of their possible future <br>
+To take care.
+:—Roger Waters, ''Your Possible Pasts''}}
+Per the [[entropy|second law of thermodynamics]] but pace Pink Floyd, there is but ''one'' possible past, ''one'' possible now, and an infinite array of  possible futures stretching out into an unknown black void. Some short, some long, some dystopian, some enlightened. Some cut off by apocalypse, some fading gently into warm entropic soup.
+William MacAskill’s premise is, however you look at it, there are more people in our species’ future than there are in its present, those in its present have a duty of care to those yet to come that swamps the short term interests of the present assembled.
+We are minding the shop not just for our children and grandchildren but for generations millennia hence. ''Thousands'' of millennia hence.
+But here is his first logical lacuna. The causal chain behind us stretches unitarily unbroken back to where our records begin. Behind us the probability of each successive step is 1. As the saying goes, it is easy to be wise in hindsight.
+But in front of us alternate possibilities branch into the infinite. Over a generation or two it is easy enough to anticipate and provide for our own progeny. [[Darwin’s Dangerous Idea|Darwin’s dangerous algorithm]] naturally wires us to do this.
+But over a million years of non-linear interactions in our hypercomplex ecosystems, our possible futures are so so uncertain and disparate that we cannot possibly know how decisions we make now will reverberate in the feedback loops and subroutines of this colossal organic machine.
+And, inany case, any decisions we make now to prefer one outcome is surely to disfavour an infinity of others. Who are we to try to play God?
+[[William MacAskill]] is undoubtedly intelligent and well-read, and applies his polymathic range to scoping out this million-year-old argument. He is probably ''too'' well-read. You sense it would do him the world of good to put the books down spend some time pulling pints or labouring on a building site. Get some education from the school of life.
+Still, it took me a while to put my finger on what was so irritating about this book. To be sure, there’s a patronising glibness about it: 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.
 {{Author|William MacAskill}} is, as best as I can make out, barely out of undergraduate [[philosophy]] class himself and hasn’t yet left the university. A thirty-something ethics lecturer would strike most people (other than himself) as an unlikely source of cosmic advice for the planet’s distant future. So it proves.