Top Quotes: “What We Owe the Future” — William MacAskill

“As a way to operationalise longtermism I now suggest the following goal: the rich countries of the world should devote at least 1 percent of their GDP to causes that distinctly benefit future generations, such as pandemic preparedness, Al safety, forecasting, and resilient infrastructure to help us survive major catastrophes.”

“Benjamin Franklin had such a reputation for believing in the health and longevity of the United States that in 1784 a French mathematician wrote a friendly satire of him, suggesting that if Franklin was sincere in his beliefs, he should invest his money to pay out on social projects centuries later, getting the benefits of compound interest along the way. Franklin thought it was a great idea, and in 1790 he invested £1000 (about $135,000 in today’s money) each for the cities of Boston and Philadelphia: three-quarters of the funds would be paid out after one hundred years, and the remainder after two hundred years. By 1990, when the final funds were distributed, the donation had grow to almost $5 million for Boston and 12.3 million for Philadelphia.”

“Even in the European Union, which in global terms is comparatively unpolluted, air pollution from fossil fuels causes the average citizen to lose a whole year of life.”

“Between 100 BC and AD 150 the Roman Empire and the Han dynasty each comprised up to 30 percent of the world’s population, yet they barely knew of each other. Even within one empire, one person had very limited ability to communicate with someone far away.

In the future, if we spread to the stars, we will again be separated. The galaxy is like an archipelago, vast expanses of emptiness dotted with tiny pinpricks of warmth. If the Milky Way were the size of Earth, our solar system would be ten centimetres across and hundreds of metres would separate us from our neighbours. Between one end of the galaxy and the other, the fastest possible communication would take a hundred thousand years; even between us and our closest neighbour, there-and-back communication would take almost nine years.

In fact, if humanity spreads far enough and survives long enough, it will eventually become impossible for one part of civilisation to communicate with another. The universe is composed of millions of groups of galaxies. Our own is called, simply, the Local Group. The galaxies within each group are close enough to each other that gravity binds them together forever. But, because the universe is expanding, the groups of galaxies will eventually be torn apart from each other. Over 150 billion years in the future, not even light will be able to travel from one group to another.”

“If we had taken action on climate change earlier, we would have been acting on more speculative evidence than we have now. But the issue would also have been much less politically divisive, and change might have been much easier. Bill Mckibben, one of the world’s leading environmentalists, suggested this, saying in 2019: “Thirty years ago, there were relatively small things we could have done that would have changed the trajectory of this battle — a small price on carbon back then would have yielded a different trajectory, would have put us in a different place. We might not have solved climate change yet because it’s a huge problem, but we’d be on the way.”

The lesson Bill McKibben takes from the history of climate change activism is that we should pay close attention to new challenges as they arise. He highlights advanced artificial intelligence in particular: “We haven’t taken [advanced artificial intelligence] seriously because it doesn’t, at the moment, impinge on our day-to-day life. But one of the things that climate change taught me is that things happen fast, like, really fast. And, before you know it, they’re out of control. So the time for thinking about them is when there is still some chance of getting a handle on them.” He’s right. With climate change, we may have missed one moment of plasticity, and we should hope there are more to come. But perhaps we can also learn a more general lesson and respond more rapidly to new challenges — like artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, tensions between the United States and China, the rise of new ideologies, and the potential slowdown in technological progress — as soon as they arise.”

“Lay’s moral radicalism took many forms. He opposed the death penalty and consumerism. Like many of the later abolitionists, and very unusually for the time, he became a vegetarian and even refused to wear leather or wool. Later in his life, he lived in a cave just outside Philadelphia and, boycotting all goods produced by enslaved people, made all his own clothes, wore undyed fabrics, and refused to drink tea or eat sugar.

His opposition to slavery stemmed from his time as a sailor, when he learned of the pervasiveness of rape on the transatlantic slave ships, and from the two years he spent in Barbados. Early in his time there, he whipped several enslaved people who, racked by hunger, had stolen food from his shops. He was subsequently stricken with guilt and made friends with a number of enslaved people.”

“During Quaker meetings, as soon as any slave owner tried to speak, it was said that Lay would rise to his feet and shout, “There’s another negro-master!” When kicked out of one meeting for making trouble, he lay down in the mud outside the entrance of the meetinghouse so that every member of the congregation had to step over his body as they left. When he discovered that a local family kept a young girl as a slave, he invited their six-year-old son to his cave without telling his parents so that they would briefly know the grief of losing a child.

In his most famous stunt, at the 1738 Yearly Meeting of the Quakers, he came dressed in military uniform under a large cloak, carrying a hollow book filled with fake blood. During the meeting, he allegedly rose to his feet, threw off his cloak, and exclaimed, “Oh all you Negro masters who are contentedly holding your fellow creatures in a state of slavery…you might as well throw off the plain coat as I do. It would be as justifiable in the sight of the Almighty, who beholds and respects all nations and colours of men with an equal regard, if you should thrust a sword through their hearts as I do through this book!” As he spoke, he splattered the gathering with the fake blood. John Woolman, who later became one of the most influential Quaker abolitionists, was likely in the audience that day.”

“After 1807 the British government resolved to stamp out slave trading worldwide. They used diplomacy and bribery to persuade other nations to ban the transatlantic slave trade and used the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron to police the seas. This made it harder for slave ships to travel between West Africa, the United States, and the American and Caribbean colonies of France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland. The campaign ultimately captured more than two thousand slave ships and freed over two hundred thousand enslaved people, although those freed were often exploited in other ways and sent to work across the British Empire.”

“Crustaceans tend to evolve towards crab-like forms so often that the process of becoming a crab has its own name: carcinisation.”

“There are two ways in which AGI could accelerate growth. First, a country could grow the size of its economy indefinitely simply by producing more AI workers; the country’s growth rate would then rise to the very fast rate at which we can build more Als. Analysing this scenario, Nordhaus found that, if the Al workers also improve in productivity over time because of continuing technological progress, then growth will accelerate without bound until we run into physical limits.

The second consideration is that, via AGI, we could automate the process of technological innovation. We have already seen this recently to some extent: DeepMind’s machine-learning system AlphaFold 2 made a huge leap towards solving the “protein folding problem” — that is, how to predict what shape a protein will take — reaching a level of performance that had been regarded as decades away. If AGI could quite generally automate the process of innovation, the rate of technological progress we have seen to date would greatly increase.”

“Given the clear mechanisms by which AI could generate far faster growth rates, we should take this possibility very seriously. Economies could double in size over months or years rather than decades.”

“Ambrosia, a California start-up, charges its elderly customers $8,000 for injections of two and a half litres of blood plasma harvested from teenagers.”

“AGI could affect who has power, too. AGI might be developed by a company or a military, and power could be in their hands rather than the hands of states. International organisations or private actors may be able to leverage AGI to attain a level of power not seen since the days of the East India Company, which in effect ruled large areas of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. AGI could not just upend the international balance of power; it could also reshape which kinds of actors matter most in world affairs.

If we don’t design our institutions to govern this transition well — preserving a plurality of values and the possibility of desirable moral progress — then a single set of values could emerge dominant. They may be those championed by a single individual, the elites of a political party, the populace of a country, or even the whole world.”

“Journalist Matt Yglesias recently proposed that, in order to maintain global influence, the United States should radically increase immigration, aiming to have a population of one billion people.”

“On average, atheists have few children compared to the religious, especially fundamentalists and those in poorer countries. Over time, this matters. According to the Pew Research Center, by 2050 the proportion of people with no religious affiliation (which includes atheists, agnostics, and people who do not identify with any religion but who may hold some religious or spiritual beliefs) will decrease from 16 percent to 13 percent of the world population.”

“Even though India’s fertility rate has dropped to 2.2 births per woman today, it could well become the world’s largest economy by the end of the century; by then, its population size is predicted to be 40 percent greater than China’s. For similar reasons, Nigeria looks set to become a far more important geopolitical actor by 2100 because its population is projected to grow from 200 million to 730 million, making it the third most populous country in the world.”

“Both the Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were designed by mid-January 2020 over the course of a few days. Not a single country allowed human challenge trials of the many vaccines developed in 2020, where willing volunteers would be vaccinated and then deliberately infected with the coronavirus in order to very quickly test the vaccine’s efficacy. Not a single country allowed the vaccine to be bought on the free market, prior to testing, by those who understood the risks, even on the condition that they report whether they were subsequently infected.

I’m not going to argue here that any particular policy was better than another. But the global benefits of a diversity of responses would have been immense. If just one country had allowed human challenge trials or had allowed vaccines to be sold freely, we all would have gained the knowledge that the vaccines were effective months earlier than we did. It would still have taken significant time to ramp up production of the vaccines, but we could have brought forward the end of the pandemic by several months. In this case, homogeneity in the global response to COVID-19 was responsible for millions of deaths.”

“Swastika Night, written by Katharine Burdekin, takes seriously Hitler’s claim that he would create a thousand-year Reich: set seven hundred years in the future, it depicts a world which is entirely controlled by the Nazis and the Japanese Empire. In the German Empire, non-Germans have been subjugated, violence is glorified, and women are kept in pens and raped at will. To us, it reads like a piece of alternative history, but it was really a prophetic warning about ideological lock-in; the book was written in 1935, four years before World War I broke out, and published in 1937, twelve years before 1984, at a time when Hitler still had considerable international prestige.”

“One particularly interesting idea for promoting cultural diversity of societies is that of charter cities: autonomous communities with laws different from their surrounding countries that serve as laboratories for economic policies and governance systems. For example, in 1979 Deng Xiaoping created a special economic zone around the city of Shenzhen, giving it more liberal economic policies than the rest of China. Average yearly income grew by a factor of two hundred over forty years. Its success inspired broader economic reforms across China, which, over the course of the last forty years, have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.”

“Of the world’s adults, 15 percent would like to move to another country if they had the opportunity.”

“At the time of writing, community forecasting platform Metaculus puts the probability of an engineered pandemic killing at least 95 percent of people by 2100 at 0.6 percent. Experts I know typically put the probability of an extinction-level engineered pandemic this century at around 1 percent; in his book The Precipice, my colleague Toby Ord puts the probability at 3 percent.”

“I read the news about the Galwan Valley clash on June 15, 2020 — a violent skirmish between Indian and Chinese soldiers in territory high in the Himalayan mountains that is claimed by both countries. The two countries had made agreements not to use firearms along the disputed border, so instead, they attacked each other with stones, clubs, and batons wrapped in barbed wire. More than twenty people died. One report suggested that “ties between both countries [had] reached their lowest point since the 1962 [Sino-Indian] war.””

“Despite the enormous loss of life and destruction of infrastructure, power was restored to some areas within a day, to 30 percent of homes within two weeks, and to all homes not destroyed by the blast within four months. There was a limited rail service running the day after the attack, there was a streetcar service running within three days, water pumps were working again within four days, and telecommunications were restored in some areas within a month. The Bank of Japan, just 380 metres from the hypocenter of the blast, reopened within just two days. The population of Hiroshima returned to its predestruction level within a decade.”

“After the fall of the Soviet Union, which had been the sole supplier of Cuba’s agricultural equipment and supplies, Cuba lost all access to fossil fuels, fertilizers, pesticides, and agricultural machinery and depleted its stores within a few years. In response, Cuba implemented an emergency programme to breed four hundred thousand oxen to replace its industrial machinery, allowing it to avoid widespread famine.”

“Compared to the nuclear arsenals we have today, their destructive power was tiny. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomic, relying on the fission of uranium or plutonium; in contrast, the first H-bomb, which utilised the energy released from the fusion of hydrogen isotopes into helium, was developed in 1952 and was five hundred times more powerful. The largest bomb tested had an explosive yield of fifty million tonnes — over three thousand times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”

“Thankfully, total US and Russian stockpiles have fallen by a factor of seven since their peak in 1986. But they are still very high, with 9,500 nuclear warheads remaining.”

“Because all countries with nuclear weapons are in the Northern Hemisphere, the impacts of a nuclear winter would be more limited in the Southern Hemisphere; and because oceans retain heat, coastal areas would be much less affected. For coastal South America or Australia, a nuclear winter would result in a summer about five degrees cooler than usual.”

“This makes the chance of global recovery higher. Those countries, perhaps Australia and New Zealand, that would not be directly affected would have their population, infrastructure, knowledge base, and political and civil institutions intact. And they could be self-sufficient: Australia and New Zealand already grow several times the amount of food required to sustain their own population; between them, they have ample fossil fuel reserves. Even in the wake of such an unprecedented disaster, civilisation would continue.”

“Thanks in part to youth activism, attention towards climate change has increased significantly, and several key players have made ambitious climate pledges, most notably China, which plans to reach zero emissions by 2060, and the European Union, which is aiming for 2050; and efforts are increasing at the state level in the United States.

Second, there has also been huge progress on key low-carbon energy technologies: solar, wind, and batteries.

Thanks to long-standing policy support from environmentally motivated governments, the cost of solar panels has fallen by a factor of 250 since 1976, while the cost of lithium ion batteries has fallen by a factor of 41 since 1991. Even though solar and wind supply only around 3 percent of energy today, if the exponential cost declines continue, in twenty years they will supply a substantial fraction of global energy. Similarly, in the next few years, the total cost of ownership for electric cars — including purchase, fuel, and maintenance costs — is projected to drop below that of petrol and diesel cars.”

“The chance of the end of civilisation this century, whether via extinction or permanent collapse, is far too high for us to be comfortable with, in my view, giving this a probability of at least 1 percent seems reasonable. But even if you think it is only a one-in-a-thousand chance, the risk to humanity this century is still ten times higher than the risk of your dying this year in a car crash.”

“It’s likely that additional progress inherently becomes harder the more progress one has already made.

Over the past century, we’ve seen relatively steady, though slowing, technological progress. Sustaining this progress is the result of a balancing act: every year, further progress gets harder, but every year we exponentially increase the number of researchers and engineers. For instance, in the United States, research effort is over twenty times higher today than in the 1930s. The number of scientists in the world is doubling every couple of decades, such that at least three-quarters of all scientists who have ever lived are alive today. So far, exponential growth in the number of researchers has compensated for progress becoming harder over time.”

“For twenty-three countries, including Thailand, Spain, and Japan, populations are projected to more than halve by 2100; China’s population is projected to decline to 730 million over that time, down from over 1.4 billion currently.”

“The Hungarian government has been spending up to 5 percent of its GDP on fertility subsidies. For example, mothers with four or more children get a lifetime exemption from income tax. But they have only managed to raise the fertility rate from roughly 1.3 to 1.5. Though this is substantial, it’s far from reaching even the replacement rate.”

“A second reason why stagnation might last a long time is population decline. As we’ve seen, global population will plausibly not just plateau but shrink. Fertility rates almost everywhere are falling to substantially below 2. At 1.5 children per woman (roughly the average in Europe), within five hundred years the world population would fall from ten billion to below one hundred million; at one child per woman (roughly the fertility rate in South Korea), the world population would fall to one hundred million within two hundred years.”

“In rich countries, people generally want to have more kids than they end up having: Americans, for example, want to have 2.6 children on average but have only 1.8. In significant part this is because work and other commitments get in the way. But increasingly, people are starting to see the choice to have children as an unethical one because having children means greater carbon dioxide emissions and faster climate change.

I think this is a mistake. Children have positive effects as well as negative ones. In addition to the direct positive impacts on their family and the friends they will make, when children grow up they contribute to public goods through their taxes, they build infrastructure, and they develop and champion new ideas about how to live and how to structure society. The recent decline in fertility might lead to a long period of stagnation, extending the time of perils. Having kids can help mitigate this risk.”

“In 2016, Apple was the consumer brand that best predicted whether a purchaser was rich and well educated (in 1992, the brand that best predicted income was Grey Poupon mustard).”

“In his study of the Hadza from Tanzania, one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies in the world, the anthropologist Frank Marlowe noted,

The Hadza sing often, and everyone can sing very well. When several Hadza get in my Land Rover to go somewhere, they almost invariably begin singing. They use a melody they all know but make up lyrics on the spot. These lyrics may go something like “Here we go riding in Frankie’s car, riding here and there in the car. When Frankie comes, we go riding in the car.” They take different parts in a three-part harmony, never missing a beat, all seemingly receiving the improvised lyrics telepathically.”

“Farmed fish also suffer terribly. Fish farms are very overcrowded: salmon, which are around seventy-five centimetres long, can be given the space equivalent of just a bathtub of water each. This overcrowding precludes natural behaviour and leads to injury and premature death. Mortality in fish farms ranges from 15 percent to 80 percent. Atlantic salmon and rainbow trout are starved for several days, sometimes for two weeks or more, to empty the gut before slaughter. Most farmed fish are killed by being left to asphyxiate slowly to death, which can take more than an hour. Others are gassed with carbon dioxide or have their gills cut while still conscious.”

“The biomass of human beings is five times larger than the biomass of all wild birds, reptiles, and mammals combined, and humans have three times as many neurons. But the biomass of fish is ten times larger than that of humans, and there are at least ten thousand times as many fish as human beings.”

“While some adult fish species can live for decades, more than 90 percent of fish larvae die mere days after hatching — eaten, starved, or suffocated. Those that make it to adulthood may suffer from diseases — fungal, bacterial, and viral infections — just as humans do. And the vast majority of adult fish will die not of old age but will instead suffocate as a result of an algal bloom, or be killed by parasites, or die of exhaustion after building their nest or releasing their eggs, or be torn apart or swallowed whole then crushed in a predator’s esophagus.”

“The Aymara are an Indigenous nation, comprising nearly two million people, who live in Bolivia, northern Chile, Argentina, and Peru. Their traditional dress is brightly coloured, and their flag resembles technicolour glitch art. In the Aymara language, the future is behind us and the past is in front of us. So, for example, the phrase nayra mara is composed of the word for “front” (which also can refer to “eve or “sight”) and the word for “year,” which means last year.” Nayra pacha literally means “front time” but refers to a “past time.” To say “from now on,” one says akata ghiparu, literally, “this from behind towards,” and to refer to a “future day” one says ghipüru, literally, “behind day.”

This conceptual metaphor is not restricted to Aymara speakers’ choice of words. When referring to an event in the future, an Aymara speaker might point their thumb over their shoulder. This effect even persists when native Aymara speakers talk in a second language like Andean Spanish.

Almost all languages represent the future as ahead of us because when we walk or run, we both travel through time and travel forward through space. In the Aymara language, the more important feature of time is what we know and what we don’t. We can see the present and the past; they are laid out before us. We can therefore have direct knowledge of them in a way we can’t know the future — anything we know or believe about the future is based on inference from what we have experienced in the present or the past. The implicit philosophy is that, when making plans for the future, we should take much the same attitude as if we were walking backwards into unknown terrain.”

“Consider the recent wave of advocacy for reducing plastic. The total impact this has on the environment is tiny. You would have to reuse your plastic bag eight thousand times in order to cancel out the effect of one flight from London to New York. And avoiding plastic has only a tiny effect on ocean plastic pollution. In rich countries with effective waste manage-ment, plastic waste very rarely ends up in the oceans. Almost all ocean plastic comes from fishing fleets and from poorer countries with less-effective waste management.”

“By going vegetarian, you avert around 0.8 tones of carbon dioxide equivalent every year (a metric that combines the effect of different greenhouse gases). This is a big deal: it is about one-tenth of my total carbon footprint. Over the course of eighty years, I would avert around sixty-four tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

But it turns out that other things you can do are radically more impactful. Suppose that an American earning the median US income were to donate 10 percent of that income, which would be around $3,000, to the Clean Air Task Force, an extremely cost-effective organisation that promotes innovation in neglected clean-energy technologies. According to the best estimate I know of, this donation would reduce the world’s carbon dioxide emissions by an expected three thousand tones per year. This is far bigger than the effect of going vegetarian for your entire life.”

“After decades of campaigning, in 1998 the Greens became part of the coalition government in Germany, and in 2000, they introduced landmark legislation that would almost singlehandedly underwrite the global solar industry’s growth, making Germany the world’s largest solar market. By 2010, Germany accounted for nearly half of the global market for solar deployment. From the perspective of providing power to Germany alone — a northern-latitude and fairly cloudy country — this made little sense. But from a global perspective, it was transformative. Thanks to this and other subsidy schemes introduced around the same time, the cost of solar panels fell by 92 percent between 2000 and 2020. The solar revolution that we’re about to see is thanks in large part to German environmental activism.”

“Every day we breathe in dirty, pathogen-filled air, which often makes us sick. If installed widely, low-wavelength light could kill airborne viruses before we breathe them in, dramatically reducing how often we get sick and making the next pandemic less likely. Future generations would live better lives, and so would almost everyone alive today.

But we’re not there yet. We need researchers to assess the safety and feasibility of low-wavelength light. We need engineers to make it more affordable. We need policy professionals to design sensible regulations, and entrepreneurs to bring this technology to market.

This is just one of many areas within biosecurity where there is much work to be done. We also need to:

• Improve personal protective equipment. Currently, the masks, gloves, and suits used by healthcare workers are protective but not perfect. If faced with an extremely infectious and deadly pandemic, they would not be good enough. We need to develop next-generation equipment that provides effective protection against even the most extreme threats and is lightweight and cheap to make in huge quantities.
• Build extremely secure refuges. We could build sealed and self-sufficient refuges that are impervious to disease. In a worst-case pandemic, they could shelter some people from harm, such as researchers working on countermeasures.”