Thread by William MacAskill

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My new book, What We Owe The Future, is now available for pre-order!

It makes the case for longtermism, the view that positively affecting the long-run future is a key moral priority of our time.

Here's a thread about it...
🇬🇧oneworld-publications.com/what-we-owe-the-future-hb.html
🇺🇸basicbooks.com/titles/william-macaskill/what-we-owe-the-future/9781541618626/
How would our priorities change if we truly took future lives as seriously as our own?

What We Owe The Future explores crucial questions about our long-term future, ranging from history to philosophy to economics to technology, such as:
What can we learn from previous social movements, such as the abolition of slavery, about changing society’s values for the better? And in general, how historically contingent is moral progress?
How likely is a global civilisational collapse, and would we recover from one? Could rapid advancements in artificial intelligence “lock in” our values this century for future generations?
Are we at risk of technological stagnation, and what does this mean for our ability to tackle risks of extinction and collapse from engineered pandemics, nuclear weapons, and extreme climate change?
Do we make the world better by bringing more happy people into existence? Will the future be good or bad, on balance?
Is this the most important century for the long-term future? How can we best use our careers and resources to leave our grandchildren’s grandchildren a world of justice, hope, and beauty?
This matters so much because the future is *big*. If humanity avoids collapse or extinction and lasts just as long as a typical mammalian species, future lives will outnumber us ten thousand to one.

ourworldindata.org/longtermism
And crucially, the nature of these lives — whether they will be flourishing or miserable, egalitarian or oppressed, or whether or not they will exist at all— might well be determined by what happens this century.
That’s the case for longtermism in a nutshell: future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better.
My tentative hope is that What We Owe The Future will be like Animal Liberation but for future generations: impacting broadly how society thinks about the interests of future people, and inspiring us to take action to safeguard the long term.
I think I’ve worked harder on this project than on any other in my life. When the pandemic started, I dropped everything and spent two years dedicated to research and writing.
I was aided by an amazing team of research assistants, without whom I simply could not have written such a wide-ranging book. Each page was obsessively fact-checked. The endnotes are almost as long as the book itself!
And now, I’m so excited that the launch date is finally in sight: Aug 16th in the US and Sep 1st in the UK. I’m just over the moon that I can finally share this book with you all and hear what you think!
The questions I address in this book are huge and deserve decades of research. I'm particularly excited to hear where people *disagree* with my initial findings. The stakes couldn't be higher.
If you’re interested, please consider pre-ordering it now with the links below:

🇬🇧oneworld-publications.com/what-we-owe-the-future-hb.html

🇺🇸basicbooks.com/titles/william-macaskill/what-we-owe-the-future/9781541618626/
Correct UK link here: oneworld-publications.com/work/what-we-owe-the-future/
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