Submission statement:

This article is a review of William MacAskill’s new book “What We Owe the Future.” According to the review, the book rejects the scientific consensus that we have roughly a decade left to initiate the changes needed to preserve a living planet capable of supporting a complex civilization. In fact, even ­MacAskill’s “worst-case” climate scenario—the burning of 300 years’ worth of fossil fuels, resulting in three trillion tons of emitted carbon—is a survivable scenario with a sunny side.

Lots of people think Musk is just conspiring with China and Russia for money, but I think the real problem is longtermism, which means Musk is prepared to sacrifice millions of Ukraine today to prevent the low risk of nuclear war killing trillions of future people spread around the stars.

While there is a logic to it, I don't think potential people have any rights, and the interest of actual living people outweigh potential future people, else banning contraception would be justified also.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/thenewrepublic:

Submission statement:

This article is a review of William MacAskill’s new book “What We Owe the Future.” According to the review, the book rejects the scientific consensus that we have roughly a decade left to initiate the changes needed to preserve a living planet capable of supporting a complex civilization. In fact, even ­MacAskill’s “worst-case” climate scenario—the burning of 300 years’ worth of fossil fuels, resulting in three trillion tons of emitted carbon—is a survivable scenario with a sunny side.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yf37ne/the_heavy_price_of_longtermism_longtermists_focus/iu1fpwy/

Interesting thought about contraception, but I feel there's an argument to be made that banning it still wouldn't fit the longtermist view because of the high probability of causing suffering for so many unwanted future kids and 'creating' more emotially damaged adults.

I don't think Longtermism is the same as utilitarianism, as believers in Longtermism believe they can guarantee that the future is better, if they can only control the present, so more people is automatically better.

Their overconfidence is the issue.

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Longtermism is a very interesting philosophy. I think most people are aware it’s correct, but we don’t talk about it because of the implications. Kind of like veganism or the anti-abortion movement.

You had me going there for the first part…the second part kinda threw me

I like the idea of longtermism, but disagree with the assumption of constant economic growth. We need steady-state profitability, environmental sustainability and never-ending advances in science and tech

While we do have to plan policy with future generations in mind, it also needs to be human, forcing people into having kids and veganism stuff will not be a net benefit for society.

The important thing is to have a sustainable society: meeting current needs without endangering the needs of future generations

what do they mean longeterm?

500 years?

1000 years?

10,000 years?

100,000 years?

I suppose I can see Humanity still being around 1,000 years from now, but I don't know if we we will become a vastly superior technologically civilization compared to what we have now, or if things won't change much.

Humanity being around 10,000 years from now is a bit of a strech.

Profitability is incompatible with the other 2. Profit motive optimizes for profit, not RnD, the environment or anything else. Not to mention that the profit motive breaks down with high levels of automation.

Its not about any guarantees its about maximizing the probability of the best possible future to the best of our ability.

We were potential people at some point, and its not about rights. Its about making sure survival is maximized. The future will exist so better it be one with humans in it than not. Also the fact that there will be exponentially more humans in the future than in the past.

As soon as we somewhat colonize the solar system our long term survival is practically guarantied minus some extremely unlikely event or the universe being a dark forest. So millions or even billions of years is not improbable if we colonize the system.

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I agree with the idea that the long term survival of humanity should be the main and only priority however, the way they go about it is really stupid. Full of idealism that somehow better morals will be useful and pretending that capitalism will somehow survive.

“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

The Singularity Believes in 99% of Humanity the ability to become One With It.

“the scientific consensus that we have roughly a decade left to initiate the changes needed to preserve a living planet”

That isn’t a scientific consensus. In fact, I’m not aware of a single scientist anywhere who believes this.

I love that illustration, spot on! Does it mention massive egos?

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I would prefer this to the alternative (n. have not read this article as walking to work)

How would forcing veganism not be a net benefit? In general, people would be much healthier and we'd be using much less water, which will become more scarce as temperatures rise.

There is no scientific consensus that we have a decade left to "preserve a living planet". This is hysteria. Climate change is bad but the Earth has sustained warmer periods in the past.

Of course we should be thinking about the long term future. Maybe The New Republic should also write an article about how we shouldn't save for retirement because we have bills to pay right now.

Veganism is about animal rights. Animal protein is ok if we don't like destroy the amazon for burgers. The scale and methods used to raise animals is the problem. Lab meat will be a thing.

Do you mean humanity evolved into something that isn't human within 10k years? Or humanity being extinct?

I believe that all 3 are compatible.

Companies look for profit and that produces a lot of externalities. Some good, some bad.

I believe that the bad ones can be solved by regulation and enforcement.

Stricter regulations level the playing field for the entire industry and prevent atrocities from being made.

I find it funny that neoliberals view regulations as poison when, in fact, companies get benefited by them and some of them actually lobby the government to put in more regulations.

I know, it might seem counterproductive and weird for companies to do this, but let’s imagine a scenario:

Company A uses slave labor and wants to do so. Company B doesn’t want to for ethical reasons or whatever other reason it might be.

Because company A uses slave labor, it can produce stuff at lower prices. This means that company B is forced to either use slave labor as well, or to go bankrupt and exit the market.

By government regulation (in this case abolishing slavery), no company has this advantage and company B can, therefore, still make profits and operate in a more ethical way.

Point is: Companies can’t afford to be eco-friendly, defend human rights, and other basic stuff that is crucial for society. It’s not their role, to be honest. They are profit seeking institutions and they must fight against other companies for market relevance and survival.

The government, however, has the power to align companies’ interests with those of society by regulating the market. This is what industrial economists do for a living. Finding the society welfare maximizing regulations that aim at erasing the negative externalities whilst keeping the positive ones.

As long as you have a market dominated economy whatever goverment you have will become controlled by that market. They got the money they got the power.

Also, even if you could control corps, markets are inefficient anyways, they waste insane resources on useless advertising, often spend multiple times the resources on doing the same RnD simply due to being separate entities, make useless copy products only differenciated by brand, and they are inefficient from an information stand point too. For example company A knows some economic information which would provide more value if shared with the entire market/society than if it kept it private. The result will be that it will keep it private in order to maximize private profit. This is the issue with the profit motive, no matter what regulations you slap on it it will always optimize for self maximization not societal. An amazing example of this is oil companies finding out about climate change and not telling anyone. The slave labor example you gave is another example of the fundamental issues with markets. Attempting to patch up a fundamentally broken system is a fools errand.

The better alternative is a planned economy, and yes they do work, the idea that they are inefficient, never innovate, and never work is cold war propoganda easily contradicted by the fact that the USSR was the world's second largest economy, a world superpower, sent the first man and satellite to space, first spacecraft on the moon and another planet. This was all after having gone through ww2 most of their industry destroyed, 20% of men killed, and being cut off from international trade. Yes they did go through famines and then they ended those famines for the first time in the region's history. All this in additon to lacking modern communication and computational technology rather having to use mechanical calculators. History, as much as propoganda would like it to be otherwise, is clear.

Today with our modern technology could easily have a planned economy superior to any economy planned or market of past. For example, supply chain issues often are only delt with one market actor at a time, only responding once the problem hits them leading to disorganized and uncoordinated responses. In contrast a planned economy can detect such an issue and communicate to each factory or warehouse etc in parallel. It's basically like vertically integrating the entire economy. It would also allow us to far more easily fight global warming since we would have direct and total control over the entire economy, no need to incentivise and hope corps go green when we can just do it instead. Another pro of many is that information would flow freely, without competition no one has an incentive to keep information private and progress can happen in a cooperative manner rather than being stunted, as evidences by how crucial openness is to the scientific community. Such a democratically planned economy would be fundamentally aligned with the interests of people unlike markets for which you have to hope that their profit motive aligns with the common good.

Then its about just forcing whatever maximizes health and minimizes environmental issues and cost.

because you take away choice. That is the same as making world peace by enslaving everyone. There would be tons of people who would just become depressed af.

Like I said, it's not justified to make the lives of living people worse to improve the lives of unborn people. We don't owe anything to the future, particularly if, as increasingly is the case, people chose not to have children or have children at below the replacement rate.

> The future will exist so better it be one with humans in it than not.

This is neither here nor there for living people. Your actual life will not be measurably improved by people 1000 years from now living the star trek future.

> Also the fact that there will be exponentially more humans in the future than in the past.

If you look at population curves, you can't actually guarantee that. Bayesian logic and the mediocrity principle suggest you are living in the most populated time currently, and in the future, there will be fewer or fewer people, and certainly not quintillions, else why are you one of the very special first 100 billion?

I hate not being able to throw my trash directly out the window. They are enforcing on me absurd laws!

Yes we do have a responsibility to the future, survival/existence is the prerequisite for anything you could possibly want for humanity besides the death of humanity, thus it should be the priority. Our function as a species is to survive.

Why should I or anyone else care about the survival of "humanity"? It's just a concept.

This isn't about people living in the present, this is about the existence of humanity over time. I am prioritizing humanity as a collective super organism not as a group of individual organisms.

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That is wrong for 2 reasons, first assuming that people will always have life spans of about 80 years, given technological development solving immortality is inevitable, second even if we assume limited lifespans the collective lifespans summed over the rest of the life of the universe assuming constant population size is still many many magnitudes larger than the current population size.

Why should you care for the suffering or pleasure of a living human, its just a group of cells or neurons, just a concept.

Look in the end there is no objective reason to care about suffering collective survival or whatever. All morality is made up. The reason I advocate for long term collective survival being maximized is because its the closest thing there is to an objective function for a species.

> assuming constant population size

There is really no reason to assume this. The fact that our population is set to peak suggests decline in the future.

> I am prioritizing humanity as a collective super organism not as a group of individual organisms.

That's your choice. There no real imperative for that.

So Heinlein predicted it yet again…. The Long range foundation.

The Long Range Foundation (LRF), a non-profit organization that funds expensive, long-term projects for the benefit of mankind, has built a dozen exploratory torchships to search for habitable planets to colonize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars

This sounds like a techobillionares rationalization to play out their star trek fantantasies and get to the singularity before they die. They won't be the ones making any real sacrifices.

I have a concern that civilization on Earth is sliding backwards. If we don't create space colonies now, we may never do it.

That is a moronic take with food you are taking away sovereignty over people's own bodies. That is also why it is hard to ban cigarretes and alcohol. In those cases the substances that are banned are such a net loss for the person and society as a whole that it was banned. Meat however even with all the energy and water it costs is not on the same level of harmful as those other substances.

I use a 10^12 years longtermism horizon, thus I'm nihilist.

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Do we really pay that heavy a price for "Longtermism"? What about "Shorttermism"? On a comparative scale, which seems to have the heavier price, right now?

How much "Longtermism" is there, really, anyway? Reading TFA I see it is small and mostly a philosophical idea that has some proponents with lots of money. Yet those same proponents are also fully invested in shorttermism via the corporations they own.

So, I see a lot of lip service to longtermism but no real traction on the ground that would allow me to believe that we are paying a "heavy price" for it.

...instead of being politicians. Too much experience is really bad, as we see watching these ancient white men grapple with modern times.

The ridiculous part is that by allowing people to eat meat, you are taking away the sovereignty of animals over their own bodies (the ones killed to make that meat).

They deserve to have rights too. There's a reason that animal abuse laws are a thing. The absurd thing is that it only applies to some species of animals and not others, especially when some of them are smarter than domestic animals.

Your framing implies they should literally plant trees instead

Indeed. They'd probably live better lives too. We all, wood.

Are you familiar with ecological economist Herman Daly, or Gorgesu-Roegan?

Gonna get banned for wrongthink but... even from a non-longtermism standpoint he's still right though. How about the risk of nuclear war killing billions of the current population? Becuase that's what's being risked right now and if you point out that 2 nuclear powers are in a proxy war and that there's a real chance of a nuclear exchange happening, people think you are somehow deranged. This is our generations cuban missle crisis and there's basically no attempt at diplomacy. It's lunacy.

I take the longtermism stance but having said that there's very good arguments for us getting out of Ukraine to protect billions of current lives.

Yep, most societies have difficulties planning for anything other than next quarter or election cycle. Cancerous shortemism is far FAR more prevalent and we see it's disastrous consequences daily.

> even from a non-longtermism standpoint he's still right though. How about the risk of nuclear war killing billions of the current population?

Well, the issue is that Putin may kill you if you don't stop him where he is. The example being Hitler of course.

If you appease bullies they become more confident, until someone actually stops them.

If you think that is completely unrealistic, places like Lithuania do not, and remember the whole of Eastern Europe remembers being under occupation by the USSR.

The Hitler excuse is extremely overplayed. The truth of the matter is far more complicated and nuanced. Russia tolerated nato expansion towards it's borders for 3 decades and putin for more than one after we promised several times in public to the Russians that we would not do that. No nuclear nation is going to tolerate a hostile aligned military aliance with nukes on its borders. Just imagine what the US would do if China convinced Mexico to join a military aliance...

Basically, this is not some fairy tale good vs evil simple story. This is the real world. We should have allowed Russia to have a nuetral buffer zone between it and NATO not for Russia's sake but for everyone's. The world is a safer place when nonaligned nuclear powers have some territory between them. Like what do you think the endgame is here? Russia legitimately sees this as a large national security threat not becuase of it's bullshit Ukrainian nazi propaganda but becuase it doesn't want to be contained/surrounded by nato. What does everyone think is gonna happen when you corner a nuclear armed country?

Edit: Why do idiots try to send a last message after they block you lol? I can't see your weak ass comeback if you block me.

Ah, sorry, I thought you were a pragmatist, but you are just a vatnik repeating Putin's talking points.

But, are you quantifying the net loss of society due to climate change?

Don't think of 1 person, think what happens if the entire planet consumes an all meat diet... we will increase the indirect damage of climate change many times. So I agree with you, we should make laws to reduce the net loss of humanity as a hole.

> in the future, there will be fewer or fewer people

This only applies to Earth. There will be countless of people living off Earth. At, least we should hope so.

Every species goes extinct eventually. Some sooner than others.

You should be happy to see, that we have never been closer to that goal as we are now! :-)

We don't really need a steady state any time soon though. Our solar system alone has enough resources to cover the needs of hundreds of billions of people

It's mostly down to a matter of utilizing resources more efficiently that we do currently

How did you get to that conclusion? Even if this was true in the past, why would it apply to the future? I am genuinely curious. Not trolling.

That is not a controversial thing to say.

> The background level of extinction known from the fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria, and fungi, not just the large vertebrates we are most familiar with). In contrast, estimates based on the rate at which the area of tropical forests is being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, are that we may now be losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone.

> The typical rate of extinction differs for different groups of organisms. Mammals, for instance, have an average species "lifespan" from origination to extinction of about 1 million years, although some species persist for as long as 10 million years. There are about 5,000 known mammalian species alive at present. Given the average species lifespan for mammals, the background extinction rate for this group would be approximately one species lost every 200 years. Of course, this is an average rate -- the actual pattern of mammalian extinctions is likely to be somewhat uneven. Some centuries might see more than one mammalian extinction, and conversely, sometimes several centuries might pass without the loss of any mammal species.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/2/l_032_04.html

It can of course be summarized in the words "nothing lasts forever".

And as to why it would apply in the future - entropy.

"Yes, but if I bulldoze the forest and sell the wood to pay for a tree-planting robot that fertilizes the ground with a slurry paste made of ground up old men, my effective shade metrics are much higher over the next 40,000 years."

The issue with longtermism is it allows billionaires to claim they are "speaking for those future trillions" when they ignore the poor of today, or even engineer a genocide today so the likelihood of those future people being born is increased.

The current preachers for longtermism will, of course, make lots of money today while writing and teaching and congratulating the billionaires on how wonderful their plans are.

It's hard to get a conversation going if your go-to answer is the heat death of the universe :-).