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What We Owe the Future Hardcover – August 16, 2022
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“This book will change your sense of how grand the sweep of human history could be, where you fit into it, and how much you could do to change it for the better. It's as simple, and as ambitious, as that.”
—Ezra Klein
An Oxford philosopher makes the case for “longtermism” — that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.
The fate of the world is in our hands. Humanity’s written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more — or it could end tomorrow. Astonishing numbers of people could lead lives of great happiness or unimaginable suffering, or never live at all, depending on what we choose to do today.
In What We Owe The Future, philosopher William MacAskill argues for longtermism, that idea that positively influencing the distant future is a key moral priority of our time. From this perspective, it’s not enough to reverse climate change or avert the next pandemic. We must ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; counter the end of moral progress; and prepare for a planet where the smartest beings are digital, not human.
If we make wise choices today, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will thrive, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope and beauty.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBasic Books
- Publication dateAugust 16, 2022
- Dimensions6.45 x 1.45 x 9.65 inches
- ISBN-101541618629
- ISBN-13978-1541618626
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“An optimistic look at the future that moved me to tears.”
―Joseph Gordon-Levitt, actor
“What We Owe The Future makes the case for thinking seriously about the very long term. It gives a profoundly new perspective on human civilization and our place in it.”
―Lydia Cacho, journalist and author of The Demons of Eden
“What We Owe the Future is an intellectually thrilling exploration of moral philosophy and human history in the hands of a very skilled thinker and clear writer… Thought provoking.”―Charter
“Unapologetically optimistic and bracingly realistic, this is the most inspiring book on ‘ethical living’ I’ve ever read.”―The Guardian (UK)
“In focusing on the interests of future generations stretching into an indefinitely long future, MacAskill has thrust an important and neglected argument into the spotlight, while making it vivid and fun to read. He hopes this book will change the world, and it might.”―Financial Times (UK)
“Touchingly optimistic… With something to ponder on every page, a bracing exhortation to do right by the people of centuries to come.”
―Kirkus“MacAskill delivers a sweeping analysis of contemporary dangers that masterfully probes the intersections of technology, science, and politics, while offering fascinating glimpses into humanity’s possible futures. This urgent call to action will inspire and unnerve in equal measure.”―Publishers Weekly
“What We Owe the Future is an instructive, intelligent book. It has a lot to teach us about history and the future, about neglected risks and moral myopia.”―Boston Review
“No living philosopher has had a greater impact upon my ethics than Will MacAskill. In What We Owe The Future, MacAskillhas transformed my thinking once again, by patiently dismantling the lazy intuitions that rendered me morally blind to the interests of future generations. This is an altogether thrilling and necessary book.”
―Sam Harris, five-time New York Times bestselling author and host of the Making Sense podcast
"An exciting new book."―Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
“An extraordinary book. I've never read something so deep and fundamental, and so accessible at the same time . . . The publication of this book is a monumental event. William MacAskill is one of the most important philosophers alive today, and this is his magnum opus.”―Rutger Bregman, Dutch historian and author of Utopia for Realists
“This is a book of great daring, clarity, insight and imagination. To be simultaneously so realistic and so optimistic, and always so damned readable … that is a miracle for which MacAskill should be greatly applauded.”
―Stephen Fry, actor
"There are moments when we can change outcomes easily, but if we don't bend those curves right then, we can lock in enormous long-term damage. This fascinating book makes us think relentlessly and usefully about such pivot points; few prods could be more important.”
―Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author of The End of Nature
"Many books promise a new ‘big idea’, but few deliver one as brilliant as MacAskill’s in What We Owe The Future. A fascinating, profound read."
―Julia Galef, author of The Scout Mindset
“Warning: This book may radically upgrade your ethics and expand your compassion. What We Owe The Future is an inspiring roadmap to how we can try to improve the lives of the billions and trillions sentient beings yet to come. It’s perhaps our greatest moral duty. So please do yourself – and your grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren – a favor and read this book.”
―AJ Jacobs, editor at large of Esquire Magazine
“This mind-bending, eon-hurtling, visionary, masterful book raises questions that are among the most crucial we face as a species. MacAskill makes a moral case for the future that is urgent, clear, and utterly convincing.”
―Larissa MacFarquhar, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Strangers Drowning
“To assess what really matters it always helps to zoom out, and Will MacAskill is probably the world’s best zoom-outer. What We Owe The Future brilliantly shows us the biggest picture of all and persuasively reminds us of the vast impact we can all have.”
―Tim Urban, co-founder of Wait but Why“I expected William MacAskill to write a forceful and persuasive argument for caring more about future people and this book did not disappoint. But it’s so much more—What We Owe The Future is an engaged and deeply original exploration of questions ranging from the contingency of moral progress, to the perils of AI, to the very nature of a happy and fulfilled life. It’s an important, stimulating, and delightful book.”
―Paul BloomAbout the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Basic Books (August 16, 2022)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1541618629
- ISBN-13 : 978-1541618626
- Item Weight : 1.25 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.45 x 1.45 x 9.65 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #28,653 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9 in Philosophy of Good & Evil
- #95 in History & Theory of Politics
- #115 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality
- Customer Reviews:
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What We Owe the Future
Hachette
About the author

I'm Will MacAskill, Associate Professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. My academic research focuses on the fundamentals of effective altruism - the use of evidence and reason to help others by as much as possible with our time and money, with a particular concentration on how to act given moral uncertainty.
I am the author of Doing Good Better - Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference, and Moral Uncertainty. My latest book is What We Owe The Future.
I am the Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research, a co-founder and the President of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) and I helped to create the effective altruism movement. Through Giving What We Can, CEA encourages people to commit to donate at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities. CEA also runs over 100 effective altruism local groups, hosts regular effective altruism conferences, and does research into high-impact policy and philanthropic opportunities.
I also co-founded 80,000 Hours, a YCombinator-backed non-profit that provides research and advice on how you can best make a difference through your career.
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MacAskill takes seriously the possibility that there *won't* be any humans in the future--this is called "existential risk," and there is plenty to worry about (engineered pathogens, nuclear war, AI takeover, climate catastrophe) etc. However, he argues that--if we can survive these existential risks--there's good reason to believe that there will be more humans ahead of us than you can imagine. He points out that if humans last as long as the typical mammal species, 1 million years, then our future as a species (700,000 years) is more than twice our history (300,000). This would lead to 80 trillion future humans, at current population rates. (In contrast, since most of our history as a species was at the low population density of hunter-gathers, only about 100 billion humans have lived so far--the vast majority in the last century.) That means, if we're a typical mammal species, 99.5% of human life-years are ahead of us a species, not behind us. MacAskill asks a simple question: shouldn't we care about these people and the quality of their lives morally?
It's obvious (to doom-and-gloom people like myself, at least) that humanity could last dramatically shorter than other mammals (I would point out that kangaroos and rabbits don't create nuclear weapons, bioweapons, or AI). But MacAskill points out it's also possible our civilization could last dramatically longer (nor do kangaroos or rabbits have the possibility of colonizing space and spawning multiple civilizations). If we do take to space and last millions of years, the number of human lives ahead of us grows to levels beyond comprehension.
MacAskill's book keeps posing a simple question: shouldn't we care for their well-being? He then provides clear guidance for *how* you can best care for their well-being, after he convinces you that you *should* care.
MacAskill's book is filled with things that you've never thought about, but that seem obvious once he points them out. Have you thought that there might be trillions of humans in the future? I hadn't--and yet he makes this point seem obvious in just a few pages in the Intro.
And here's another thing that seems obvious once he says it. With regards to future humans, MacAskill argues:
"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. But, really, this analogy understates my case. A teenager knows approximately how long she can expect to live. But we do not know humanity’s life expectancy. We are more like a teenager who, for all she knows, might accidentally cause her own death in the next few months but also might live for a thousand years. If you were in such a situation, would you think seriously about the long life that might be ahead of you, or would you ignore it?"
Basically, MacAskill is asking us to stop acting collectively like teenagers with regard to the potential lifespan ahead of our species. He's asking us to wake up to our future, and grow up.
He argues that we are at a particular malleable point in history where small shifts could get "locked in" and shape the future of trillions of people in the future. He also argues convincingly that large-scale changes are more "contingent" than you would imagine--meaning that a relatively small group of people can create massive positive ripple effects that wouldn't have happened otherwise. If this book inspires enough people to rise to the challenge it poses, it's possible that in millions of years, humans will look back and view it as the most important book ever written. There's not too many contemporary books you could say that about plausibly. This is one of them.
The overwhelming feeling you come away with from reading this book is that your actions today are vastly more important and consequential than you imagined. And that your actions today can have an outsized impact. It's ultimately an empowering book. Who couldn't use a little empowerment right now?
I am a pessimist by nature--I'm currently writing my fourth book, entitled "Joyful Pessimism"--so I can't say this book switched me over into wild-eyed optimism for the future. But it made me, a hard-core pessimist, consider that the future might actually be better than I imagined. (It has made me go back and take into account his views in my own book.) Believe me, for this hard-core life-long pessimist, that is very high praise for this book.
But interesting points on the contingency of moral events, and of value lock in.
I think the section on technological stagnation raised more questions than answered. This is a risk I am least concerned with.
It seems to me that the most important contribution to long term good is to focus on improving current society values. If one succeeds it helps solve all other problems. If the society has bad values it will not be saved by any technological solution.
The unborn billions of humans have no say in our lives - they can't vote or consume yet their good or bad fortune is critically dependent on many decisions we make today e.g. about climate change, the use of nuclear or biological weapons, the environment, artificial intelligence and moral values. Wrong decisions we make in the present may destroy or warp this long-term future for all or some of the creatures who will live on our planet.
William MacAskill, the author of the book is a philosopher who makes a moral case for us to care about the long term future. He outlines the dangers we need to avoid in order to have a good long term future and the tools we can use to make decisions in conditions of uncertainty. Finally, he makes recommendations about what each of us can do to ensure a better future.
First of all, he argues that future people matter just like we do -and if saving lots of lives is important, the unborn billions must be considered. In our hearts, we know he is right – if our grandchildren are to live a good life , why not their grandchildren and so on? The future is big and beyond our comprehension . We may not understand just how different it could be from our world today - but ensuring that there will be a future should be a top priority. MacAskill,writes "longtermism is the idea that positively influencing this longterm future is a key moral priority of our time."
He is very convincing in examining the threats to our civilization from the lock-in of despotic or totalitarian ideas especially following a takeover by intelligent robots, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems that surpass us in intelligence and then eliminate us. On the other hand stagnation in technological progress at an unsustainable level might leave us vulnerable to other disasters and catastrophes. We are living in a highly interconnected society with rapid economic and technological growth , unprecedented in human history. MacAskill says we need to use this pivotal period of high plasticity to experiment and diversify so we can discover the values and ways of living best suited to a good future. He believes that even in a worst case scenario of global nuclear war , our civilization and our scientific and agricultural knowledge would not be completely eradicated.
I appreciate that It is difficult to start a new field of study like “longtermism” and I was very curious about this book, but after reading it I was disappointed.
Having rightly pointed out the difficulty of grasping the “unknown unknowns’ in our future, MacAskill resorts to the misuse of a formula for expected outcomes to try and guess probabilities of very uncertain events like whether we can achieve AGI in this century, He also treats us to a chapter on moral arithmetic, where he discusses ridiculous ideas for calculating total or average wellbeing in a group of people. Moreover he is optimistic about the future, claiming that that the good must outweigh the bad, because bad people cannot be 100 percent bad. So if Hitler loved his mistress and his dog perhaps he wasn’t all bad after all? How ludicrous.
What would have made this book much better would have been an exploration and analysis of visions of the future in science fiction. H.G Wells and Jules Verne made a good job of predicting the future without understanding probability theories or expected values. A truly convincing good future needs great foresight not moral arithmetic.
Top reviews from other countries
This fascinating yet non-fiction and non-gloomy well written book is a deeply interesting book whatever country you're in. The book is about us all on Earth and it's about what our future could be like. Our future could be great beyond belief and yet predictably charted as likely to be that great by wise use of technology and resources. Clearly that's contingent on politics and business deciding we deserve a great future, but it could happen. Goodness knows we've had a lot of wake-up calls to abandon bad politicians and bad political systems so politics and business might be much better in some countries in the nearish future. We also feel after the pandemic we deserve a great future. It could happen. And by describing a possible great future, this book might help that future happen.
There was an almost complete lack of awareness of how the world works now and how improvements might positively impact on the problems MacAskill worries about. For example, he worries about future technological stagnation. Surely, one way to tackle this would be to try to achieve greater levels of social and economic equality, increased access to education, better equality in the workplace etc so that more people get the opportunity to realise their potential?
Overall there was a marked naïveté, coupled with tunnel vision, about the realities of life for people outside his own circle of philosophers (and perhaps also tech billionaires). The section towards the end of the book about how to choose one’s career to maximise its longtermist impact for good seemed particularly unmoored. How many people, in the current economy have the luxury of being able to choose their career according to these lofty ideals, to frequently return to education, and to periodically change direction? It might be possible for some - but for those with dependants and no financial safety net it’s a pipe dream.
So, does this mean that the book’s call to action is only really for an elite? A vanguard of the longtermist revolution? MacAskill doesn’t come out and say so but the implication is that is must be.
I also lost confidence in the book early on when he made a statement about something I know about from my own career. In the context of talking about AI he says:
“In Chapter 1 we saw that Shakespeare and Horace really might have achieved immortality through their poetry. Information can persist indefinitely because the cost to replicate it is so tiny. But software is just complex information. It can be replicated easily. For example, one of the first commercially available computer games was Pong by Atari, released in 1977.58 You can still play it today online.52 Though eventually all original Atari consoles will rust and crumble, Pong will live on. The software that defines Pong is replicable, and if every future generation is willing to pay the tiny cost of replicating this little piece of history, it will continue to persist. Pong could last as long as civilisation does.”
This statement tacitly assumes that:
- All information is held digitally.
- All digital information can easily be copied.
- If a copy of some digital information exists, it can be accessed and read.
- All of the above is vanishingly cheap to achieve.
MacAskill additionally assumes that this is true not only for information but for software.
Not a single one of those assumptions is accurate, as anyone involved in archives, libraries or conservation of analogue or digital information objects could tell you. Preservation of information, whether in the form of manuscript paper records, newsprint, cellulose acetate film, magnetic tape, unstructured collections of digital files, structured databases, websites or software takes time, expertise and money on an ongoing basis.
In my view, two of the bad characteristics of some of the intellectual groups with which Will MacAskill is somewhat associated are 1) a tendency to be naive or ignorant about factors involving economic, social and political imbalances, and 2) a tendency to be dismissive, ignorant and blasé about fields of expertise that aren’t core to their interest. Possibly I’m being unfair but I think those faults are how MacAskill can end up with a statement so freighted with error as “information can persist indefinitely because the cost to replicate it is so tiny.”
I’d still recommend reading and drawing your own conclusions, but I was not persuaded.















