To investors,

I have been reading one book per week this year. This past week’s book was What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill. Highly recommend reading it. If you are interested in the individual highlights that I made in the physical book, you can read those here. Hope you enjoy these notes every Monday morning.

Book’s main argument:

This book argues the idea of longtermism, or a belief that present day humans have a moral obligation to make decisions which will benefit future humans that could be hundreds, thousands, or millions of years away. It is written by an Oxford philosopher and has a mix of data, philosophy, and technology analysis. Some of you will agree with the premise of the book, while others will disagree with it, but it is guaranteed to make you think more deeply about the subject.

5 Big Ideas:

💡 Idea #1 — Humans have a moral obligation to think about future humans that are not yet born. MacAskill writes on morality:

I present this thought experiment because mortality, in central part, is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own. When we do this at the full scale of human history, the future - where almost everyone lies and where almost all potential for joy and misery lies - comes to the fore.

He then discusses the idea of longtermism and the moral ramifications.

Longtermism - the idea that positively influencing the long term future is 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.

💡 Idea #2 — Future humans matter in the same way that strangers matter. MacAskill writes:

Distance in time is like distance in space. People matter even if they live thousands of miles away. Likewise, they matter even if they live thousands of years hence. 

Just as caring more about our children doesn’t mean ignoring the interests of strangers, caring more about our contemporaries doesn’t mean ignoring the interests of our descendants.

💡 Idea #3 — Values of a society can be locked-in at a given moment, which creates a highly persistent set of rules that will be followed by millions of people. We rarely understand which ideas will survive and which ideas will be thrown away. MacAskill writes:

Value lock-in: an event that causes a single value system, or set of value systems, to persist for an extremely long time.

Values can be highly persistent. A familiar but remarkable fact is that the best-selling book this year, as every year, is the Bible, completed almost two thousand years ago. The second best-selling book is the Quran. 

💡 Idea #4 — Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is one of the most important technologies to pay attention to from a longterm perspective. This is something that MacAskill spends a decent amount of the book on. He writes:

The development of AGI would be of monumental longterm importance for two reasons. First, it might greatly speed up the rate of technological progress, economic growth or both. The second reason, crucial from a longterm perspective, is AGI’s potential longevity.

MacAskill then describes an increase in economic growth as being a continuation of the historical trend, which is counter-intuitive for most people.

This might seem implausible, but, remarkably, moving to much faster rates of economic growth would be a continuation of historical trends. We are used to thinking about growth in terms of a steady exponential, where a country’s economy grows by a few percent every year. But over the long run growth rates have accelerated. In the early agricultural era, the global rate of economic growth was around 0.1% per year; nowadays, it is around 3% per year. Before the Industrial Revolution, it took many centuries for the world economy to double in size; now it doubles every twenty-five years.

MacAskill finishes with the warning that AGI could create the ultimate value lock-in, which would be concerning if we don’t have the best ideas or values at the moment.

These two features of AGI - potentially rapid technological progress and in-principle immortality - combine to make value lock-in a real possibility.

💡 Idea #5 — Just as AGI is a potential benefit to society that comes with great risks, so does biotechnology. The rapid rise of the technology is exciting but MacAskill believes we should be very careful. He writes:

Biotechnology is an area of research that tries to build new biological entities or alter those already found in nature.

This rapid technological progress promises great benefits in medicine and in the treatment of rare genetic diseases, but it also brings unprecedented risks, in particular because it gives us the power to design and create new pathogens.

What exactly does MacAskill fear? The escape of bioengineered pathogens from various research labs. Sound familiar? Kind of freaky to be honest. He writes:

I think it is difficult to rule out the possibility that synthetic biology could threaten human extinction.

Many extinction risk specialists consider engineered pandemics the second most likely cause of our demise this century, just behind artificial intelligence.

Memorable quotes:

1. Humanity today is like an imprudent teenager: most of our life is ahead of us, and decisions that impact the rest of that life are of colossal importance.

2. Just as actions taken by our ancestors thousands of years ago shaped the present day, so too will decisions we make today shape the future thousands of years hence.

3. Plasticity frequently comes after a crisis, like a war.

4. Revolutionary beliefs; cooperative behavior.

5. Values can be highly persistent. A familiar but remarkable fact is that the best-selling book this year, as every year, is the Bible, completed almost two thousand years ago. The second best-selling book is the Quran.

6. AGI agents are potentially immortal.

7. I think it is difficult to rule out the possibility that synthetic biology could threaten human extinction.

8. Past progress makes future progress harder.

9. Africa is the only major continent expected to still have significant population growth over this century.

Pomp’s Takeaways:

I wanted to read this book because William MacAskill reportedly had a large impact on Sam Bankman-Fried and his interest in effective altruism. I knew almost nothing about longtermism or effective altruism, so I figured a great way to learn was to read the book that William had written.

The first big takeaway that I had was how much humans misjudge the past and the future. We think of human history as a relatively long time (ex: thousands of years ago!), but it is actually a very short period of time compared to the existence of animals or Earth itself. At the same time, we rarely think of humanity’s future as being long, but there could be millions or billions of years ahead of our species. It is kind of crazy to think about both directions and how little we have spent thinking about them relative to our personal experience of ~ 80 years of life.

The second big takeaway was actually a disagreement with MacAskill. He (and other longtermism proponents) believe that it is the moral obligation of present day humans to make decisions that will create a more positive environment for humans of the future. This is a noble idea, but I think it ultimately falls flat under scrutiny. The future is ever-changing and humans are horrible at predicting what will happen in 10-20 years, so the idea of correctly understanding 100+ years is out of the question in my opinion. Should we try to do the “right” things? Sure. Are we capable of actually knowing what that means? Doubtful.

This leads to a potential common ground with MacAskill, which is maybe we are better off always optimizing for the preservation of optionality? “Kick the can down the road and let future humans solve their own problems” doesn’t sound as sexy - it could be the right answer though.

The third big takeaway was around plasticity of ideas. I’ve long thought about an individual’s career or life in terms of a gas and brake pedal. Sometimes you want your foot on the brake. Sometimes you want to be coasting without touching either pedal. And sometimes you want to slam on the gas when a specific opportunity arises. MacAskill reinforces this idea with an explanation of the US Constitution:

A period of plasticity also commonly occurs when some idea or institution is still new. For example, the US Constitution was written over just four months - a moment of great plasticity - and amended eleven times in its first six years of operation. After that, though, it became more rigid.

Lastly, I really enjoyed reading MacAskill’s explanation of value lock-in. People have probably heard me say that “memes are the message” or “the ability to communicate effectively is probably one of the most important skills in the world.” This infatuation with communication methods don’t necessarily highlight the message that is being shared though, so it is interesting to think about what makes an idea stick for long periods of time. Obviously we want the best ideas to stick for a long time and the worst ideas to stick for a very short period of time. Is that what is happening? How do we know? This really makes you think about which ideas you want to be permanent and which ones we should discard.

As I mentioned, this past week’s book was What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill. Highly recommend reading it. If you are interested in the individual highlights that I made in the physical book, you can read those here. Hope you enjoy these notes every Monday. Feel free to leave a comment - I read all of them.

-Pomp

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