This book is about longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time. Longtermism is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it. If humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span, then, strange as it may seem, we are the ancients: we live at the very beginning of history, in the most distant past. What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people. We need to act wisely.
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I now believe the worldâs long-run fate depends in part on the choices we make in our lifetimes. The future could be wonderful: we could create a flourishing and long-lasting society, where everyoneâs lives are better than the very best lives today. Or the future could be terrible, falling to authoritarians who use surveillance and AI to lock in their ideology for all time, or even to AI systems that seek to gain power rather than promote a thriving society. Or there could be no future at all: we could kill ourselves off with biological weapons or wage an all-out nuclear war that causes civilisation to collapse and never recover.
Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.
This is the case for longtermism in a nutshell. The premises are simple, and I donât think theyâre particularly controversial. Yet taking them seriously amounts to a moral revolutionâone with far-reaching implications for how activists, researchers, policy makers, and indeed all of us should think and act.
Values changes are significant because they have major impacts on the lives of people and other beings. But from a longtermist perspective, they are particularly significant compared to other sorts of changes we might make because their effects are unusually predictable.
If you promote a particular means of achieving your goals, like a particular policy, you run the risk that the policy might not be very good at achieving your goal in the future, especially if the world in the future is very different from today, with a very different political, cultural, and technological environment. You might also lose out on the knowledge that we will gain in the future, which might change whether we even think that this policy is a good idea. In contrast, if you can ensure that people in the future adopt a particular goal, then you can trust them to pursue whatever strategies make the most sense, in whatever environment they are in and with whatever additional information they have. You can therefore be fairly confident that you have made the achievement of that goal more likely, even if you have no idea at all what the world will be like when those future people act.
For these reasons changing values has particularly great significance from a longterm perspective. Looking to the past, we see that such changes have had an enormous impact on the lives of billions of people. Looking to the future, if we can improve the values that guide the behaviour of generations to come, we can be pretty confident that they will take better actions, even if theyâre living in a world very different from our own, the nature of which we cannot predict.
This suggests that, as longtermists, when trying to improve societyâs values, we should focus on promoting more abstract or general moral principles or, when promoting particular moral actions, tie them into a more general worldview. This helps ensure that these moral changes stay relevant and robustly positive into the future.