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Tuesday, August 9, 2022

The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism, & The Case for Longtermism-What We Owe the Future

William MacAskill’s movement set out to help the global poor. Now his followers fret about runaway A.I. Have they seen our threats clearly, or lost their way?

The philosopher William MacAskill credits his personal transfiguration to an undergraduate seminar at Cambridge. Before this shift, MacAskill liked to drink too many pints of beer and frolic about in the nude, climbing pitched roofs by night for the life-affirming flush; he was the saxophonist in a campus funk band that played the May Balls, and was known as a hopeless romantic. But at eighteen, when he was first exposed to “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” a 1972 essay by the radical utilitarian Peter Singer, MacAskill felt a slight click as he was shunted onto a track of rigorous and uncompromising moralism. Singer, prompted by widespread and eradicable hunger in what’s now Bangladesh, proposed a simple thought experiment: if you stroll by a child drowning in a shallow pond, presumably you don’t worry too much about soiling your clothes before you wade in to help; given the irrelevance of the child’s location—in an actual pond nearby or in a metaphorical pond six thousand miles away—devoting resources to superfluous goods is tantamount to allowing a child to drown for the sake of a dry cleaner’s bill. For about four decades, Singer’s essay was assigned predominantly as a philosophical exercise: his moral theory was so onerous that it had to rest on a shaky foundation, and bright students were instructed to identify the flaws that might absolve us of its demands. MacAskill, however, could find nothing wrong with it.

By the time MacAskill was a graduate student in philosophy, at Oxford, Singer’s insight had become the organizing principle of his life. When he met friends at the pub, he ordered only a glass of water, which he then refilled with a can of two-per-cent lager he’d bought on the corner; for dinner, he ate bread he’d baked at home. The balance of his earnings was reserved for others. He tried not to be too showy or evangelical, but neither was he diffident about his rationale. It was a period in his life both darkly lonesome and ethically ablaze. As he put it to me recently, “I was very annoying.”

In an effort to shape a new social equilibrium in which his commitments might not be immediately written off as mere affectation, he helped to found a moral crusade called “effective altruism.” The movement, known as E.A. to its practitioners, who themselves are known as E.A.s, takes as its premise that people ought to do good in the most clear-sighted, ambitious, and unsentimental way possible. Among other back-of-the-envelope estimates, E.A.s believe that a life in the developing world can be saved for about four thousand dollars. Effective altruists have lashed themselves to the mast of a certain kind of logical rigor, refusing to look away when it leads them to counterintuitive, bewildering, or even seemingly repugnant conclusions. For a time, the movement recommended that inspirited young people should, rather than work for charities, get jobs in finance and donate their income. More recently, E.A.s have turned to fretting about existential risks that might curtail humanity’s future, full stop.

Effective altruism, which used to be a loose, Internet-enabled affiliation of the like-minded, is now a broadly influential faction, especially in Silicon Valley, and controls philanthropic resources on the order of thirty billion dollars. Though MacAskill is only one of the movement’s principal leaders, his conspicuous integrity and easygoing charisma have made him a natural candidate for head boy. The movement’s transitions—from obscurity to power; from the needs of the contemporary global poor to those of our distant descendants—have not been altogether smooth. MacAskill, as the movement’s de-facto conscience, has felt increasing pressure to provide instruction and succor. At one point, almost all of his friends were E.A.s, but he now tries to draw a line between public and private. He told me, “There was a point where E.A. affairs were no longer social things—people would come up to me and want to talk about their moral priorities, and I’d be, like, ‘Man, it’s 10 p.m. and we’re at a party!’ ”

On a Saturday afternoon in Oxford, this past March, MacAskill sent me a text message about an hour before we’d planned to meet: “I presume not, given jetlag, but might you want to go for a sunset swim? It’d be very very cold!” I was out for a run beside the Thames, and replied, in an exacting mode I hoped he’d appreciate—MacAskill has a way of making those around him greedy for his approval—that I was about eight-tenths of a mile from his house, and would be at his door in approximately five minutes and thirty seconds. “Oh wow impressive!” he replied. “Let’s do it!”

MacAskill limits his personal budget to about twenty-six thousand pounds a year, and gives everything else away. He lives with two roommates in a stolid row house in an area of south Oxford bereft, he warned me, of even a good coffee shop. He greeted me at his door, praising my “bias for action,” then led me down a low and dark hallway and through a laundry room arrayed with buckets that catch a perpetual bathroom leak upstairs. MacAskill is tall and sturdily built, with an untidy mop of dark-blond hair that had grown during the pandemic to messianic lengths. In an effort to unwild himself for reëntry, he had recently reduced it to a dimension better suited to polite society.

MacAskill allowed, somewhat sheepishly, that lockdown had been a welcome reprieve from the strictures of his previous life. He and some friends had rented a home in the Buckinghamshire countryside; he’d meditated, acted as the house exercise coach, and taken in the sunset. He had spent his time in a wolf-emblazoned jumper writing a book called “What We Owe the Future,” which comes out this month. Now the world was opening up, and he was being called back to serve as the movement’s shepherd. He spoke as if the life he was poised to return to were not quite his own—as if he weren’t a person with desires but a tabulating machine through which the profusion of dire global need was assessed, ranked, and processed.

He was doing his best to retain a grasp on spontaneity... (continues)
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there is remarkable overlap between the best ways we can promote the common good for people living right now and for our posterity
...Every year millions of people, disproportionately in poor countries, die prematurely because fossil fuel burning pollutes the air with particulates that cause lung cancer, heart disease and respiratory infections. Moving off carbon is a win-win for both the near and the long term. The same holds for preventing pandemics, controlling artificial intelligence and decreasing the risk of nuclear war.

The idea that we could affect the long-term future, and that there could be so much at stake, might just seem too wild to be true. This is how things initially seemed to me. But I think this wildness comes not from the moral premises that underlie longtermism but from the fact that we live at such an unusual time.

Our era is undergoing an unprecedented amount of change. Currently, the world economy doubles in size about every 19 years. But before the Industrial Revolution, it took hundreds of years for the world economy to double; and for hundreds of thousands of years before that, growth rates were close to zero. What's more, the current rate of growth cannot continue forever; within just 10,000 years, there would be a trillion civilizations' worth of economic output for every reachable atom.

All this indicates that we are living through a unique and precarious chapter in humanity's story. Out of the hundreds of thousands of years in humanity's past — and the potentially billions of years in its future — we find ourselves living now, at a time of extraordinary change.

A time marked by thousands of nuclear warheads standing ready to fire. A time when we are rapidly burning fossil fuels, producing pollution that might last hundreds of thousands of years. A time when we can see catastrophes on the horizon — from engineered viruses to A.I.-enabled totalitarianism — and can act to prevent them.

To be alive at such a time is both an exceptional opportunity and a profound responsibility: We can be pivotal in steering the future onto a better trajectory. There's no better time for a movement to stand up, not just for our generation or even our children's generation, but for all the generations yet to come.

William MacAskill is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the author of the forthcoming book "What We Owe the Future," from which this essay has been adapted. nyt

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