Will MacAskill - Longtermism, Altruism, History, & Technology

okay today i have the pleasure of interviewing william caskel will is one of the founders of the effective altruist movement and most recently the author of the upcoming book what we owe the future well thanks for coming on the podcast thanks so much for having me on so my first question is what the high-level explanation for the success of the effective altruist movement?

Is it itself an example of the contingencies you talk about in the book? Yeah, I think it probably is kind of contingent. Maybe not on the order of like, this would never have happened, but at least on the order of decades.
evidence for the reason why effective altruism is somewhat contingent is just that similar

ideas have been promoted at many times during history and not taken on so we can go all the way back to ancient china the moists defended a kind of impartial view of morality and took very strategic actions to try and help all people in particular providing defensive assistance to cities under siege. Then, of course, there were the early utilitarians.
Effective altruism is broader than utilitarianism, but has some similarities. And then even Peter Singer in the 70s, he had been promoting the idea that we should be giving most of our income to help the very poor and hadn't had a lot of traction until even like early 2010 after GiveWell launched,

after GivingWell launched, after GivingWhatWeCan launched. What explains the lies of it? I mean, I think it was a good idea waiting to happen at some point.
I think the internet helped to gather together a lot of like-minded people that weren't possible otherwise. And I think there were some particularly lucky events like Ellie meeting Holden, me meeting Toby, that helped catalyze it at the particular time it did.
Now, if it's true, as you say in the book, that moral values are very contingent, then shouldn't that make us suspect that modern Western values probably aren't that good? They're probably mediocre or worse, because ex-ante you would expect to end up with the median of all the values we could have had at this point. And obviously we'd be biased in favor of whatever values we were brought up in.
Absolutely. I think taking history seriously and appreciating the contingency of values, appreciating that if the Nazis had won the world war, we would all be thinking, wow, I'm so glad that moral progress happened the way it did.
And we don't have Jewish people around anymore. What huge moral progress we had then.
Like, that's a terrifying thought. And I think it should make us take seriously the fact that we're very far away from the moral truth right now.
So I think, you know, one of the lessons I draw in the book is, you know, we should not think we're at the end of moral progress and we should not think, oh, we should lock in the kind of Western values we have now. Instead, we should think we want to ensure that we spend like a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually morally right so that the future is guided by the right values rather than merely whichever happened to win out.
So that makes a lot of sense. But I guess I'm asking a slightly separate question, which is not only are there possible values that could be better than ours, but should we expect our values? I mean, we have this sense that we've made more progress.
So like things are better than they were before or better than most possible other worlds in 2100 or 2022. I mean, should we not even expect that to be the case? Like, should our prior just be that, yeah, these are kind of meh values? I think our prior should be that our values are, you know, as good as what one would have expected kind of on average and then you can make an assessment like is the world are the values of the world today is that going like particularly well you know and there are some arguments you could make for saying no um perhaps if the industrial revolution had happened in india rather than in western europe then perhaps we wouldn't have wide-scale factory farming which i think is like a moral atrocity having said that my all things considered view is actually to think that like we're doing better than average like if civilization were just a redraw then things would look worse in terms of our moral beliefs and attitudes where i think the abolition of slavery the feminist feminist movement, liberalism itself, democracy, these are all things that like we relatively easily could have lost and are huge kind of gains.
But then if that's true, does that make the prospect of a long reflection kind of dangerous? Because if moral progress is sort of a random walk and we've ended up with a lucky lottery, then you're kind of just maybe reversing, maybe you're risking regression to the mean, if you just have a thousand years of progress. I think that moral progress isn't a random walk in general.
Like there are many forces that act on culture and on what people believe. And one of them is just what's right, moderately speaking, like what's their best argument support? That is a force.
I think it's like a somewhat weak force, unfortunately. And the idea of long reflection is getting society into a state that before we take any drastic actions that might lock in a particular set of values, we allow this force of reason and empathy and debate and good-hearted kind of moral inquiry to guide which values we end up with.
Okay, so in the book you make this interesting analogy where humans at this point in history are like teenagers. But another common impression that people have of teenagers is that they disregard wisdom and tradition and the opinions of adults too early and too often.
And so do you think it makes sense to extend the analogy this way and suggest that maybe we should be, you know, Berkey and small L long-termist and reject these inside view esoteric threats? Like, I think the Berkeyan arguments for, you know, taking history seriously and like, what kind of model views have like, stood the test of time, you know, I think that's important arguments to engage with. My view kind of goes the opposite, actually, which is that, you know, we are cultural creatures, and we, in our nature, are very inclined to agree with what other people think, agree with tradition, even if we don't understand the underlying mechanisms.
I think that works well in a low-change environment. So the environment we evolved towards, like, things didn't change very much.
We were hunter-gatherers and small bands for hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years if you include other homo species. Whereas now we're in this period of like enormous change where the economy is doubling every 20 years, new technologies arrive every single year.
That is unprecedented, and I think actually means we should, much more

than would make sense historically,

just be trying to figure things out

more from first principles.

Interesting.

But at current margins, do you think

that's still the case?

If a lot of EA and long-termist thought

is first principles thought, do you think

more history would be better than the marginal first principles thinker? I think two things. So if it's about

an understanding of history, then yeah, I actually would love EA to have a better historical understanding, mainly just like as a on the margin thing. You know, I think the most important subjects if you want to do good in the world in an EA way are philosophy and economics.
But we've got that like in abundance, whereas there's very little in the EA community in terms of historical knowledge. And I certainly felt like I learned a huge amount over the last few years, understanding that better.
Should there be even more first principles thinking? Yeah, probably. I mean, I think the kind of first principles thinking really, or what you might call first principles thinking, I think like like paid off pretty well in the course of the coronavirus pandemic, where from January, even 2020, my Facebook wall was completely saturated with people freaking out, or like at least taking it very, very seriously in a way that the existing institutions weren't.
And they weren't because they were just in this mode of like, oh, business as usual, don't panic. They weren't properly updating to a new environment and new evidence.
Now, in the book, you point out several examples of societies that went through hardship. I mean, hardship is putting it mildly, but, you know, Hiroshima after the bomb, Vietnam after the bombings, and then, yeah, Europe after the Black Death, and they seem to have rebounded relatively quickly.
Does this make you think that perhaps the role of contingency in history, especially economic history, is not that large, and it implies a sort of solo model of growth where, yeah, even if bad things happen, you can kind of just rebound and it really didn't matter? Yeah, in economic terms, I mean, I think that's the big difference between economic or technological progress and moral progress, where in the long run, at least, I think economic or technological progress is very non-contingent. I mean, it's actually fascinating, some historical contingencies you can see in technology.
The Egyptians had an early version of the steam engine. Semaphore was only developed very late, yet could have been invented like thousands of years in the past similarly with like k's flying shuttle but in the long run like the instrumental benefits of tech progress and the incentives towards tech progress and economic growth are just kind of so strong that it means like i think we get there in the end in a very wide array of circumstances and in particular just imagine there's a thousand societies and none are growing, but one is.
Then in the long run, that one becomes the whole economy. Yeah, it seems that particular example you gave of the Egyptians having some ancient form of a steam engine, maybe that points towards there being more contingency because maybe the steam engine comes out of many societies, but it only gets turned into an industrial revolution in one.
In that particular case, there's a big debate about whether quality of metalwork was actually possible to build a proper steam engine at that time. Sorry, I was mentioning those examples to say, like, historically, you actually do get, like, some amazing examples of contingency prior to the Industrial Revolution.
I think it's still contingency only on the order of, you know, centuries to thousands of years. And then in the, like, post-Industrial Revolution world, I think, I think there's much less contingency.
It's much harder to see, there are some, but I think it's much harder to see technologies that wouldn't have happened within decades if they hadn't been developed when they were. Okay, so I guess maybe the general model here of yours is that there's maybe these general purpose changes in the state of technology and those are very contingent and it would be very important to try to engineer one of those.
But other than that, it's going to get done by some guy starting to create a startup anyways. No, I mean, I think more generally, so even the case of the steam engine or semaphore that I was pointing to, which historically seem kind of maybe contingent, I think in the long run, they get developed, where if you know, if the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened in Britain in the 18th century, would it have happened at some point? Or like, would similar technologies have been developed that were vital in the Industrial Revolution? And I'm like, yes, because there are very strong incentives for doing so.
If you've just got a whole bunch of cultures and they're all in a random walk, and one hits upon like, hey, we're going to do to do industry where like a culture that's into making textiles and like doing that in an automated way as was true of england in the 18th century then that economy just takes over the world and so that's why there's this structural reason i think why economic growth is is like much much less contingent than model progress. Okay, so usually people, when they think of somebody like Norman Borlaug in the Green Revolution, it's like, if you could have done something like that, you'd be the greatest person in the 20th century.
Obviously, he's still a very good man and everything. So would that not be your view? You think the Green Revolution would have happened anyways? Yeah, so Norman Borlaug is sometimes credited with saving a billion lives.
I think he was huge. I think he was like enormously important and good force for the world.
I think it's not the case that had Norman Borlaug not existed, a billion people would have died. Rather, similar developments would have happened shortly afterwards.
Perhaps he saved tens of millions of lives. And that's a lot of lives for the person to save.
But it's not as many as just simply saying, oh, this tech was developed, this tech was used. A billion people who would have otherwise been at risk of starvation used this technology.
And in fact, even at the time, there were, not long afterwards, similar kind of agricultural developments. Yeah, okay, so then counterfactually, what group of people, what kind of profession or career choice tends to lead to the highest counterfactual impact? Is it moral philosophers? Not quite moral philosophers, although perhaps sometimes.
I think there are some examples. So just sticking on science technology, so if you look at Einstein, theory of special relativity would have been developed, you know, very shortly afterwards.
However, his theory of general relativity, I think, was plausibly like decades in advance. So you do sometimes get these like, oh, surprising leaps.
But I think we're still only talking about decades rather than millennia. And so who really does make a very long term difference? Yeah, I think it's like, moral philosophers could be one,.
I think Marx and Engels made this enormous, very long-term difference. So did religious leaders.
I think that Muhammad, Jesus, Confucius made an enormous and contingent long-term difference. And moral activists as well.
Adolitionists, campaigners, the Quakers, and other groups too. So if you think that the changeover in the landscape of ideas is very quick today, would

you still think that maybe somebody like Marx will be considered very influential in the

long future? Because communism lasted less than a century, right? Maybe it's like longer

and consequences are huge.

It's all in expectation. So as things in fact turned out, probably Marx will not be very

influential over the long-term future. But that could gone another way it's not like such a wildly different history where rather than liberalism emerging dominant in the 20th century it was communism and then if it had totally on the table for me that that like persists for an extremely long time long time where if you develop certain the better technology gets, the better a ruling ideology is to kind of cement its ideology and persist for a very long time.
And so you can get like a set of knock-on effects where, okay, communism wins the war of ideas in the 20th century. Let's say in the limit forms a world government based around, world state based around those ideas.
Then via kind of anti-aging technology or genetic enhancement technology or cloning or artificial intelligence, it's then able to build a society that like literally persists forever in accordance with that ideology. Yeah, the death of dictators is especially interesting when you're thinking about contingency, because when Mao dies or when Stalin dies, there's huge changes in the regime,

which makes you think, yeah, the actual individual there was very important, and who they happened

to be was contingent and persistent, or at least important in some interesting ways.

For sure. So if you've got a dictatorship, then you've got a single person ruling the whole of

society, and that means it's just heavily contingent, like what are the views and values and beliefs and personality of that person. Yeah, so going back to your stagnation, in the book you're very concerned about fertility because it seems that your model about how scientific and technological progress happens is number of people times average resource for productivity.
And then, yeah, if resource productivity is declining and also the number of people isn't growing that fast, then that's concerning. Yeah, number of people times fraction of the population devoted to R&D.
Yeah, thanks for the clarification. It seems that there have been a lot of intense concentrations of talent and progress in history, like Venice, Athens, Bell Labs, or even something like FTX, right? There's 20 developers making this multi-billion dollar company.
Do these examples suggest that maybe organization and congregation of researchers matters more than the actual total amount? So I actually think the model works for these and be pretty well. So throughout history, you're starting from this very low baseline like very low um technological like level compared to compared to today and most people aren't even trying to innovate or if they're trying to innovate it might be in things that we wouldn't now call like science technology so it might be theology it might um so one argument for why baghdad its golden age, scientific golden age,

is because the political landscape changed such that what was incentivized

was theological investigation

rather than scientific investigation

in the kind of 10th, 11th century AD.

Similarly, one argument for why did Britain

have a scientific and industrial revolution

rather than Germany

was because all of the intellectual talent in Germany

was focused on making amazing music. And that doesn't compound in the way that making textiles cheaper does and so if you look at like sparta versus athens for example like what was the difference between sparta and athens i think it's just that like they had different cultures such that in athens intellectual inquiry was awarded and because they're starting from a much lower base, even just, you know, hundreds of people or thousands of people trying to do this thing that looks vaguely like science or vaguely like what we now think of as intellectual inquiry has these enormous kind of impacts.
I see. But then if you take an example like Bell Labs, right? So late 20th century, the low-hanging fruit is mostly gone.
But then you have this one small organization that does six Nobel Prizes, I think. So yeah, then is this a kind of a coincidence and lucky break? Yeah, I wouldn't say that at all.
And I should acknowledge the model where what you're working with is just size of the population times what fraction of the population you're putting towards R&D. That's like a toy model.
It's like maybe the simplest model you could have of it. And so Bell Labs, like I think is like punching above its weight.
I think you obviously can create like, you know, amazing things from like a certain environment where not only are you getting like the very most productive people, but you're putting them in an environment where they're like 10 times more productive than they would otherwise be. However, I think what I would say is when you're looking at the grand sweep of history, those effects are comparatively small compared to the broader culture of a society or the sheer size of a population.
I want to talk about your paper on long-termist institutional reform. So yeah, you, you, one of the things you advocate in this paper is that we should have, uh, what, what one of the houses be dedicated to words, long-termist priorities.
Can you name like some specific performance metrics you would use to judge like, or incentivize the group of people who make up this body? Uh, sure. Yeah.
I mean, the thing I'll caveat with long-termist institutions is I'm actually pretty pessimistic about them. I have this paper exploring it, but there's just this fundamental issue that if you're trying to represent or even give consideration to future people, you just have to face the fact that they're not around and they can't lobby for themselves.
And so you're going to have co-option by um you

know people in the present however you could have this like assembly of people who have um some sort of like real regulatory power how would you constitute that like my best guess is you just like have a random selection from the pop from the population um how would you ensure the incentives are aligned? Well, there are things that you can try, okay, in 30 years' time, their performance will be assessed by a panel of people who look back and say, okay, was the policies that were being recommended here, were they good or not? And perhaps the people who are part of this assembly assembly their pensions are getting paid on the basis of that assessment and then secondly the people in that 30 years time their assessment both their policies and their assessment of the previous you know the 30 years previous futures assembly get assessed by another assembly 30 years after that and so on and so it's like and they're like is some like math and economic analysis such like under certain conditions this checks out like you have this like backwards chaining um where people in a thousand years time are evaluating the people in 970 years time who are evaluating the people in 910 years time and like can you get that to work i mean like maybe in theory i'm like again a little bit more skeptical in practice but you know i would love some country to try it and see it see what happens the other thing i should say actually it's just like there is some evidence as well that you can just get people to take the interests of future generations more seriously by just telling them like this is your role there was one study that like got people to don't like put on ceremonial robes and act as like trustees of the future and they really did make like like different policy recommendations than when they were just acting like on the basis of their own beliefs of self-interest. Yeah.
But if you are on that board that is judging these people 30 years before you, is there something you'd be like, okay, this is the metric I care about most expected, I don't know, future GDP growth or something that you think would be the most informative about how good those decisions were? Yeah, I mean, there are things you could do. Like, you know, it could be, yeah, GDP of the country.
It could be like, you could agree on a set of metrics, like homelessness rate, perhaps some expert measure of technological progress. I think you would absolutely want there to be expert assessment of like risk of catastrophe as well.
We don't have this at the moment, but like you could imagine like you have a panel of super forecasters who are predicting like what is the chance of like a war between great powers occurring in the next 10 years.

And that gets aggregated into a war index.

I think that would be a lot more important index than the stock market index,

and we don't have it.

But you could imagine that being fed in as well.

Because you wouldn't want something which is just like,

oh, you're only incentivizing economic growth at the expense of tail risks.

Would that be your objection to a scheme like Robin Hanson's

about just maximizing expected future GDP using prediction markets and making decisions that way? Yeah, I think maximizing future GDP is more an idea I associate with Tyler Cohen. It could be any metric, but yeah.
Okay, yeah, then Robin Hansen's idea of futarchy, where you've got vote on values, bet on beliefs, can just you know vote on what collection of goods they want to have where gdp might be one of them but also unemployment rate or also like whatever beyond that it's just pure prediction markets um again it's something i'd love to see tried and i think it's an idea in a vein of just like speculative political philosophy or like reasoning about like how could a society be extraordinarily different that is kind of very differently structured, that is incredibly neglected. Do I think it will work in practice? Probably not.
Most of these ideas wouldn't work in practice. You do have issues when it comes to prediction markets where they can be gamed or they're just simply not liquid enough.
So it's pretty notable since he developed those ideas and really worked in prediction markets. There hasn't been like a lot of success at prediction markets, where there's at least there has been a fair amount more success on kind of forecasting.
Now, perhaps you can solve those things. You, you know, have laws about what things can be voted on, like are predicted in the kind of grand prediction market.
It's not all of those things. You may have government subsidies to ensure there's enough liquidity.
But like overall I think it's pretty promising and I'd love to see it. You could try it out on a city level or something, see how it goes.
Let's take a scenario where the government starts taking the impact on the long-term seriously and institutes some reforms to integrate that perspective in. You can take an example, you can take a look at the environmental movement for an example of this where, you know, there's environmental review boards that will try to assess the environmental impact of new projects and they can repeal any proposals on this, based on this.
And then so the impact here, at least in some states and in some cases, has been that groups that have no strong plausible interest in the environment are able to game these sorts of mechanisms in order to in some cases prevent projects that would actually help the environment especially when you're talking about something a lot long-termism where it's it would be it take a long time to assess what the actual impact of something is but then policymakers are tasked with evaluating the long-term impacts of something are you worried that it would be a system that would be really easy to game by malicious actors and like what do you think happened wrong with the way that environmentalism was codified into law uh yeah i mean it's absolutely a worry like you know as in potentially just a devastating worry where uh yeah like you create something you're trying to represent future people that they're not actually around to lobby themselves so it can just be co-opted and um yeah my understanding of environmental impact statements has been similar and it's kind of for similar reasons where it's not like the environment can represent itself um it can't say what like what its interests are and so what is the right answer there like again it's super tough maybe there are these speculative proposals about you know having a

representative body that like assesses these things and are like judged by people in 30 years time that's kind of best we've got at the moment but i think at the moment it's just like we need like a lot more thought to see if like any of these any of these proposals like would actually be robustly good for the long term rather than just things that are like more narrowly focused so regulation to have liability insurance for dangerous biolabs is not in any way like about trying to represent the interests of future generations but it's very good for the long term and so at the moment i kind of primarily think that like if long term is trying to change the government like let's focus on like fairly narrow set of institutional changes that are very good for the long term, even though they're just not in the game of representing the future. That's not to say I'm opposed to all such things, but there are major problems with implementation problems with any of them.
I see. I guess if we don't know how we would do it correctly, do you at least have an idea of what went wrong with, how could environmentalism been codified better? Why was that, in some cases, not a success uh yeah honestly i just don't have a good understanding of that i don't know if it's intrinsic to the matter um or if you could have had some system that like wouldn't have been co-opted in the longer term okay so are corporations the most long-term institutions we have today like their incentive theoretically is to maximize uh future cash flow um which is at least they explicitly and theoretically should have an incentive to try to do the most good they can for their own company, which implies that if there's an existential risk, then the company can't be around.
Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, I think different sorts of institutions have different kind of rates of decay associated with them.
so a corporation even a corporation that is in the kind of top 200 biggest companies i think has a half-life of only about 10 years it's actually like they're surprisingly short-lived whereas if you look at say universities um well you know oxford and cambridge are kind of 800 years old um i think it's university of bologna is even older these are like very long-lived institutions and you do get like corpus christ church at um oxford was making a decision about like should it have some new tradition that would like reoccur only every 400 years and it's like yeah that's the sort of decision it makes because it's such a long-lived institution similarly then religions like can be even longer lived again and i think that like that kind of natural half-life really affects what sort of decisions a company versus a university versus a religious institution would make. But does that suggest maybe there's, is there something fragile and dangerous about trying to make your institution last for a long time? If companies try to do that and they're not able to? Yeah, I mean, companies are composed of people.
Is it in the interest of a company to last for a long time? It's like, well, is it in the interest of the people who constitute the company, like the CEO and the board and the shareholders, for that company to last a long time? And it's like, no, they don't particularly care. At least some of them do, but most don't.
Where's other institutions yeah i mean i think it goes both ways where in some cases like this is the issue of lock-in that i talk about at length in what we are the future is that you get these moments of plasticity the formation of a new institution whether that's the you know christian church or the constitution of the United States. and that like locks in a certain set of norms and that can be really good if the set of norms and laws is are good like i think the kind of u.s constitution i don't know looking back it seems kind of miraculous or something it was like the first like uh the first democratic constitution um as I understand it was like created over the period of four months it really seems to have stood the test of time or alternatively it could be like extremely dangerous there were obviously like horrible things in that i mean we'll stick with the u.s constitution there were horrible things in there and it was the like legal right to slavery was proposed as like a constitutional amendment if that had had gone in, that would have been like a horrible, a horrible kind of piece of lock-in.
And so I think it's hard to answer in the abstract because it really depends on like what is the thing that's persisting for a long time. Did you say in the book that you expect our current era to be a moment of plasticity? Why do you think that is? Yeah, I think the specific time is a moment of plasticity for two reasons.
One is that, so the world is completely, is like unified in a way that's very historically unusual. You can communicate with anyone basically instantaneously.
And there's a great diversity of model views. So we can have arguments, we can find, you know, like people coming on your podcast can like debate, like what's morally correct.
It's plausible to me that one of like many different kind of sets of model views like might kind of win out or become like the most popular ultimately. And then secondly, so we're at this period where things really can change.
But it's a moment of plasticity because it also at least plausibly could come to an end where I think the various ways that in the coming decades or centuries the model change that we're used to could end uh so if there was a single um global culture or world government um again like before that you know if there was a global communist state or globalist nazi global nazi state um or other sort of world government that preferred ideological conformity then combined with technology i think it becomes kind of unclear, like why would that end over the long term? And I think the key technology here is artificial intelligence, where the point in time, which may be sooner than we think, for all we know, where the rulers of the world are digital rather than biological, that could persist. Once you've got that plus global hegemony of a single ideology, then there's not much reason, it seems to me, for that set of values to change over time.
You've got immortal leaders and no competition. And what are the other sources of value change over time? I think they can be accounted for too.
But isn't the fact that we are in a time of interconnectedness that won't last if we settle space, isn't that a reason for thinking that lock-in is not especially likely? If your overlords are many, many millions of light years away, then how well can they control you? Well, I think the worry that I have is that the control will happen before the point of space settlement. So I think it's totally right that if one day we took to space and there's many different settlements of different solar systems and they are pursuing different visions of the good, then I think you're probably going to maintain diversity for the very long time.
I think it's like, just given the kind of physics of the matter, I think once the solar system has been settled, then it's very hard for other civilizations to come along and conquer you. At least if we're at a period of level of technological maturity, where there aren't new groundbreaking technologies to be discovered.
But I'm worried that the control will happen earlier.

I'm worried the control might happen this century,

within our lifetimes.

I don't say that's very likely,

but I think it's seriously on the table, 10% or something.

Yeah, so going back to the long term

of the long termism movement,

there's many instructive foundations

that were set up about a century ago,

like Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie, Ford Foundations.

And they don't seem to be especially creative

or impactful, especially today.

What do you think went wrong?

Why was there, if not value drift,

I guess just some decay of competence

and leadership and insight?

Yeah, I don't have super strong views

about those particular examples,

but two natural thoughts.

One is that four organizations that want to persist a long time and keep having influence for a long time, historically, they've tended to specify their goals in far too narrow terms. So one fun example is Benjamin Franklin.
He invested a thousand pounds for each of the cities of Philadelphia and Boston to pay out after 100 years and then 200 years for different fractions of the amount invested. But he specified it very specifically.
It was to like help blacksmith apprentices and so on. It's like, oh man, this doesn't make much sense.
Like once you're in the year 2000. Whereas he could have said something much more general, like for the prosperity of people in Philadelphia, for the prosperity of people in Boston.
And then it would have had like, at least plausibly more impact. The second is just maybe a regression to the mean argument, where, you know, you have some new foundation, and it's doing like extraordinarily amount of good, as I think the Rockefeller Foundation did.
Just over time, if you're saying that it's exceptional in some dimension, it's probably going to get more close to average on that dimension. Just as a matter of you're changing the people who are involved, if there are some people who are exceptionally competent and farsighted, the next people, just statistically, are probably going to be less so.
So going back to that dead hand problem, where if you specify your mission too narrowly then yeah it doesn't make sense in the future is there a trade-off where if you just if you're too broad then again you have the ability of future actors maybe they're malicious or maybe they're just like not as smart or as uh as creative as you are to take the movement in ways that you would not approve of so if it's just like do good foriladelphia but then yeah it just turns into something that ben franklin would not have thought is good for philadelphia uh yeah i mean it depends crucially on what your values and views are um where if benjamin franklin i don't think this was true but if he was like no i just really care about blacksmiths apprentices and nothing else matters then he was correct to specify it in another another way. But I think as a matter of fact, certainly my own values, but I think more generally, they tend to be quite a bit more broad than that.
And then secondly, like in general, I expect people in the future to be like smarter and more capable. Like that's certainly the trend over time.
In which case, like if, you know, we're sharing similar broad goals and they're implementing it in a different way, then I think probably they're right and I'm wrong. Let's talk about how good we should expect the future to be.
Have you come across Robin Hanson's argument that in the future we'll all just be subsistence level ends because there'll be a lot of competition and then you'll just try to like minimize compute per digital person which will just be a miserable like barely living uh barely worth living experience uh for every entity uh yeah i'm familiar with the argument but we should distinguish the idea that M's are at subsistence level from the idea that they would have bad lives so um subsistence means that uh given their yeah you get a kind of balance of income per capita and population growth um such that uh if they were any poorer then um deaths would be kind of outweigh outweighing kind of additional births that actually doesn't tell you about their well-being so you could be very poor as an emulated being however you're just in bliss all of the time um that's like perfectly consistent with the malthusian theory and so it might seem still not like it might still seem very far away from the best possible future uh that future still could be like very good like those m's while at subsistence still could have lives like thousands of times better than ours speaking of being poor and happy there was a very interesting section in the chapter where you mentioned the study you had commissioned where you were trying to find out if people in the developing world had lives worth living. And it turns out that 19% of Indians would not want to relive their life every moment.
But I think it was 31% of Americans said that they would not. Yeah, so why are Indians seemingly much happier at less than a tenth of the GDP per capita? Yeah, I think the numbers are lower than that for memory, at least.
I think it was more like, and it depends exactly on the question asked, but for memory, it's something more like 9% of Indians wouldn't want to live their lives again if they had the option, and like 13% of Americans or something. But you are right that on this metric of how many people are happy to have lived, how many people think that they are not happy to have lived, the Indians we surveyed were more kind of optimistic about their lives, like happier with their lives than people in the U.S.
were. Honestly, I just don't want to generalize too far from that because we were sampling comparatively poor americans comparatively well-off indians so perhaps it's just a sample effect there are also like weird interactions with hinduism and the belief in reincarnation that i think like could um you know could just like mess up the kind of generalizability of this as well on one one hand, yeah, so I basically don't want to like throw any strong conclusion from that.

But it is pretty striking as a piece of information,

given that normally what you find when you look at people's well-being

is that richer countries are, you know, considerably happier than poorer countries,

on average at least.

Yeah, I guess you do generalize in the sense that you use it as evidence that most lives are worth living that most lives today are worth living right yeah exactly so i put together various um bits of evidence where um a very approximately like 10 percent of people in the united states 10 percent of people in india um seem to think that their lives are net negative you You know, they think they contain more suffering than happiness. They wouldn't want to be reborn and live the same life if they could.
And if you look at like other studies as well, like there's another study that just looks at people in the United States or United States and other generally rich countries and asks them about how much of their conscious life they'd be willing they would want to skip if they could where by skipping it just means like you blink and then you come to the end of whatever activity you're engaging with so perhaps I hate this podcast so much that I would just rather be unconscious than be talking to you in which case I would have the option of skipping obviously not to but i'd have the option of skipping and uh you know it would be 30 minutes later and it would all be done if you look at that and then also ask people about like the trade-offs they would be willing to make as a measure of intensity of how much they're enjoying or how much they're not enjoying a certain experience you get the conclusion that from memory, again, a little over 10% of people were on balance that guarded their life that day, in fact, that was being surveyed as worse than if they'd been unconscious the entire day. Jumping topics here a little bit.
On the 80,000 Hours podcast, you said that you expect scientists who are explicitly trying to maximize their impact,

that trying to do so might have an adverse impact because they might be ignoring the foundational research

that wouldn't be obvious in this way of thinking but might be more important.

Do you think this could be a general problem with long-termism,

that if you're really trying to find the most important things that are important long-term,

you might be missing things that,

yeah, wouldn't it be obvious thinking this way?

Yeah, I think it's a risk.

So among the ways that people could argue

against my general set of views,

one way that I find,

so I argue that in general,

we should be doing fairly specific and targeted things

like trying to make AI safe,

trying to govern the values of AI, trying to reduce worst-case pandemics that could kill us all, trying to prevent Third World War, trying to ensure that good values are promoted and avoid value lock-in. But what some people could argue, and people like Tyler Cohen, Patrick Collison, I think take this line, is, man, it's just very hard to predict the kind of future, the, like, future impact of your actions, and it's kind of a mugs game to even try.
So instead, what you should do is just look at, like, what things have had done loads of good kind of consistently in the past, and try to just do the same things. And then they in particular might argue that that means technological progress.
It might mean boosting economic growth. Yeah, I guess like I just dispute that.
But it's not something I feel I can give a completely knockdown argument to because it's about, you know, when will we find out who's like maybe in you know a thousand years time or something um but i just one piece of evidence um is just like the success at forecasters in general um again the fact that like i mean this also is true for tyler cohen but like you know people in effective altruism um were just realizing that uh the coronavirus pandemic was going to be a really big deal from a very early stage, was worrying about pandemics far in advance. I think there are some things that are just actually quite predictable.
So Moore's Law has held up for over 70 years. I think the idea that AI systems are going to get much, much larger, the leading models are going to get more and more um powerful that's like on trend similarly the idea that like we will be soon be able to develop viruses of like unprecedented destructive power again that's just like i think that's not actually that controversial acclaim and so even though i think that um yeah for loads of things it's just very hard to predict and they're going to tons of surprises.
But there are some things, and I think especially when it comes to like fairly longstanding technological trends, where we really can make reasonable predictions, at least about like the range of possibilities that are really on the table. But it kind of sounds like you're saying the things we know are important now are important now.
If something did turn out like a thousand years looking back to be very important, yeah, it wouldn't be salient to us now. What I was saying with me versus Patrick Colleton and Tyler Cohen, like who is correct? Well, in some sense, we will only get that information in like a thousand years time because we're talking about which strategy is going to have a bigger impact on the long term we might get like suggestive evidence earlier so if we're if kind of me and others um engaging in long-termism are making kind of specific measurable forecasts about what is going to happen with AI or advances in biotechnology, and then are able to take action such that we are relatively clearly reducing certain risks.
I think that's like pretty good evidence in favor of our strategy. Whereas if in contrast, they're doing like, well, all sorts of stuff, like not really trying to make, have like firm predictions about about what's going to happen but then things just pop out of that where we think oh that was like really good from a long-term but future perspective you know after let's say we measure this kind of in 10 years time well that would be good evidence for their view what you're saying earlier about the contingency in technology implies that even given their worldview maybe you should think that technological so even if you're trying to maximize what in the past has had the most impact, if what's had the most impact in the past is changing values, then yeah, then economic growth might be the most important thing.
Or like trying to change the rate of economic growth. Yeah, I mean, I really do take seriously the argument of like, look at how people have acted in the past, especially for people who are trying to make a long lastinglasting impact what things did they do that made sense and whatnot so towards the end of the 19th century john stewart mill and the other early utilitarians had this like long-termist little wave where they started taking the interests of future generations very seriously and their main concern was that britain would run out of coal, and therefore future generations would be impoverished.
And it's pretty striking, because they had a very bad understanding of how the economy works. They didn't predict that, well, we would be able to transition away from coal because of continued innovation.
And secondly, they had enormously wrong views about how much coal and fossil fuels there were in the world. And so that particular action just didn't make any sense, given what we know now.
In fact, that particular action of trying to keep coal on the ground, given Britain at the time, where, to be clear, we're talking about much lower amounts of coal, so small amounts of coal, so the climate change effect is kind of negligible at that level. You know, it actually probably would have been harmful.
But we could look at other things that John Stuart Mill could have done, such as promoting better values. He campaigned for women's suffrage.
He was the first British MP, I think, in fact, even the first politician in the world to promote women's suffrage. That seems to be good.
That seems to have stood the test of time. And you know that's one historical data point but like potentially we can draw a kind of more general lesson there.
Do you think the ability of global policymakers to come to a consensus is on net a good or a bad thing? I mean on the positive maybe it helps to rend some dangerous tech from ticking off, but on the negative side, it prevented human challenge trials. Maybe it causes some sort of lock-in in the future.
On net, what do you think about that trend? Yeah, the question of global integration, you're absolutely right. It has two, it's double-sided, where on the one hand, it can help us reduce global catastrophic risks.
So the fact that the world was able to come together and ban chlorofluorocarbons was you know one of the great events of the last uh 50 years allowing the hole in the ozone layer to repair itself um but on the other hand like if it just means we all converge to one some kind of monoculture and we lose out on diversity well that's like uh yeah that's like potentially pretty bad we could actually lose out on diversity, well, that's potentially pretty bad. We could actually lose out on most possible value that way.
And I think the solution is you do the big good bits and don't have the bad bits. So in a liberal constitution, you can have a country that is bound in certain ways by its constitution and by certain laws yet still enables like a flourishing diversity of um moral thought and different ways of life and so similarly in the world you could have very strong you know regulation and treaties in just that deal with certain global public goods, like mitigation of climate change, um, prevention of development of like, um, the next generation of weapons of mass destruction without thereby having like some very strong arm, like global government that implements, um, you know, a particular vision of the world.
Which way are we going? At the moment, it seems to me like we've been going in like a pretty good and like not too weathering direction, but I think that could change. Yeah, it seems the historical trend is when you have a federated political body that, where even if constitutionally the central power is constrained, that over time, like they just tend more power.
You can look at the US, you can look at the European Union, but yeah, that seems to be the trend. Yeah, and I think that's like, again, depending on the culture that's embodied there, it's potentially a worry.
It might not be if the culture itself is liberal in promoting of moral diversity and moral change and moral progress, but that needn't be the case now your theory of moral change implies that after a small group starts advocating for a specific idea it may take like a century or more before that idea reaches common purchase to the extent that you think this is a very important century um i know you have disagreements about that uh with with others but yeah to the extent that's true does that mean that maybe there just isn't enough time for long-termism to gain power that way by changing moral values? Yeah, I mean, there are lots of people I know and respect very well who think that artificial general intelligence will very, very likely lead to singularity-level technological progress, so extremely rapid rates of technological progress, and that that will happen more likely than not within the next 10, 20 years. And if so, then you're right.
Value changes are something that pays off kind of slowly over time. I mean, in the world today, so I talk about moral change taking centuries.
That's definitely more true historically. I think we can have much faster change so you know the growth of the effective altruism movement is something i know well um where that's growing at something like 30 per year compound returns mean that like actually it's not long you know that's not growth that's not change that happens on the order of kind of centuries i think if if you look at other model movements like gay rights movement, very fast, very fast model change by historical standards.
So I think, yes, if you're thinking, look, we've got 10 years till the end of history, then probably don't just very broadly try and promote better values. But I think we should have at least a very significant probability mass on the idea that we will not hit some like historical end of this century.
And in those worlds, then, you know, promoting better values could pay off like very well. Have you heard of slime old, thyme old's potato diet? I have indeed heard of slime mold time olds potato diet

and i was tempted i was tempted as a gimmick to try it um but they're onto something because as i'm sure you know the potato is close to a superfood and you could survive indefinitely on just buttery mashed potatoes if you occasionally supplement with something like lentils or oats yeah okay interesting a. Interesting.
A question about your career. Why are you still a professor? Does it still allow you to do the things that you would have otherwise have been doing, like converting more SPFs and making moral philosophy arguments for EA or? Yeah.
You're curious about that. Yeah.
I mean, it's fairly open to me what I should do, but my best guess and you know i do spend significant amounts of time um co-founding organizations or being on the board of those organizations i've helped to set up um and more recently um yeah working very closely with the future fund you know sam sbs new foundation um and helping them do as much good as possible that being said if there's like a single best guess for what I ought to do kind of longer term, and certainly that plays to my strengths better, you know, it's like developing ideas, trying to get the big picture roughly right, and then communicating them in a way that's understandable and gets more people to, you know, get off their seats and try to do a lot of good, especially for the long term. And I think I've had a lot of impact that way.
And from that perspective, having an Oxford professorship is pretty helpful. Sure, yeah.
By the way, why do you think that there's, you mentioned in the book and elsewhere, that there's a scarcity of people thinking about these big picture questions about, yeah, how contingent is history? Are people happy generally? Are these just questions that are too hard for other people or they just don't care enough? What's going on? Why are there so many people talking about this? I just think there's many, many issues that are enormously important but are just not incentivized basically anywhere in the world where companies don't incentivize work on them because they're too big picture. So some of these are like, yeah, is the future good rather than bad? If there was a global civilizational collapse, would we recover? How likely is essentially this long stagnation? There's almost no work done on any of these topics.
And yeah, companies aren't interested to ground in scale. And then academia, I think, has just developed a culture where you don't tackle such problems in academia.
Partly that's because they fall through cracks of different disciplines, and partly because they just seem too big or too grand or too speculative. Whereas academia is much more in the mode in general of making these kind of incremental gains in our understanding.
But it didn't always used to be that way. Like if you look back before the kind of institutionalization of academic research, philosophers would have all, you know, you weren't a real philosopher unless you had some grand unifying theory of like not just ethics and political philosophy, but also metaphysics and logic and epistemology and probably the natural sciences too, like economics.
And, you know, I think I'm not saying that like all of academic inquiry should be like that, but should there be at least some people whose role is to like really think about the big picture? And I think yes. Will I be able to send my kids to McCaskill University? What's the status on that project?

I'm really pretty interested in the idea of creating a new university.

There is a project that I've been in discussion about

with another person who's very excited about making it happen.

Will it go ahead? I mean, time will see.

Time will tell.

But yeah, I just think you can both do education

far, far better than currently exists. I also think you can probably do education far far better than currently exists

I also think you can probably do research

far far better than currently exists

it's extremely hard to kind of break in

to giving

especially like

creating something that's very prestigious

because the leading universities are

almost all kind of hundreds of years old

but like maybe it's possible

and I think it could generate enormous amounts of value

if we were able to pull it off

Thank you. almost all kind of hundreds of years old but like maybe it's possible and i think it would could generate enormous amounts of value um if we were able to pull it off yeah yeah okay uh

excellent all right so the book is what we owe the future and i understand free orders help a lot

grow right so yeah it was such an interesting read because how often does somebody write a book

about even the questions they consider to be the most important even if they're not the most of

our questions um yeah just that kind of like big picture thinking but you're also looking at uh any like very,

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very, very, very, very up just super interesting read Great, well thank you so much Anywhere else they can find you or any other information that they might need to know? Yeah, sure, so What We Are The Future out on August 16th in the US and 1st of September in the United Kingdom.

If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm at Will McCaskill.

If you want to try and use your time and money to do good,

Giving What We Can is an organization that encourages people to take a pledge

to give a significant fraction of their income, 10% or more,

to the charities that do the most good.

It has a list of recommended charities.

80,000 Hours, if you want to use your career to do good,

is a place to go for advice on what careers like really have the biggest impact at all and they provide one-on-one coaching too and so uh yeah all of these ways are kind of if you're feeling inspired if you think look i actually really want to do good in the world i care about future people and i want to help make their lives go better then as well as leading what we we are the future, giving what we can in 80,000 hours are the sources you can go to and get involved. Awesome.
Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. This is a lot.
Thanks so much. Yeah.
I loved it. Cool.
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