Maintaining a diversity of cultures and political systems leaves open more potential trajectories for civilisation; the same is true, to an even greater degree, for ensuring that civilisation doesnât end altogether.
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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.
The fact that our time is so unusual gives us an outsized opportunity to make a difference. Few people who ever live will have as much power to positively influence the future as we do. Such rapid technological, social, and environmental change means that we have more opportunity to affect when and how the most important of these changes occur, including by managing technologies that could lock in bad values or imperil our survival. Civilisationâs current unification means that small groups have the power to influence the whole of it. New ideas are not confined to a single continent, and they can spread around the world in minutes rather than centuries.
When we look at history, we see that the predominant culture in a society tends to entrench itself, eliminate the competition, and take steps to replicate itself over time. Indeed, many moral views regard their own lock-in as desirable.
Perhaps some changes to the worldâs institutions and cultures would be valuable trajectory changes. Either of these would be enormously important to identify. These and other crucial issues are worked on at places like the Global Priorities Institute, the Future of Humanity Institute, and Open Philanthropy.