Reading Will MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future, & BRIEFLY NOTED

For 2022-12-11 Su

FOCUS: Reading Will MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future:

The robot uprising in Oxford, and Will MacAskill, by Stable Diffusion via NightCafe

I was going to write a review of Will McCaskill's What We Owe the Future <https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541618629>, which I liked a lot.

But it then got submerged in the mishegas surrounding my own launch of Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>. In short, I never got around to it. But last week I noticed the book on my shelves again. So here we are:

Looking back on this, this turned out to be crankier than I wanted it to be. That is a result of my instinctive reaction to philosophy. Philosophy is really hard! If philosophers could make with conviction arguments that were convincing—well, those philosophers who have had that success with their philosophy have by that token become something other than philosophers, and their philosophy has become some other discipline.

First, although it is a good book, it is not a great book. I don’t see it as Ezra Klein does—“a book that 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”—because it tries to do too much and also too little. The result is that it is very wide in its scope, but not that deep in any of its arguments.

It really feels to me like five 60-page book prospectuses stapled together, with a few linkage pages.

The five prospectuses are.:

1. A Manual on Giving the Future Options: Empowering those who will know more than we do by being politically active, spreading good ideas, having children, earning to give—and remember: significance x persistence x contingency x tractability x neglectedness.

2. On Resilience: Avoiding human extinction, recovering from civilizational collapse, and heading-off civilizational stagnation.

3. A Primer on Derek Parfit: Why his take on utilitarianism is right.

4. Right Now the Future Is Big & Plastic, But That Will Soon Change: Thus we are under a strong moral geas not to say: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. What moral-philosophical mistakes we make in our generation will dog the universe as long as humanity survives, or longer.

5. Artificial General Intelligence the Biggest Menace: Specifically, our task of developing artificial general intelligence without triggering The Robot Uprising is the most important problem facing humanity today, and one that we are not thinking nearly hard enough about.

I loved reading each of these five 60-page prospectus-length arguments—not, mind you, that I agreed with them. (5) strikes me as a weird California religious cult. (4) strikes me as unbelievably grandiose. (3) is pointless, because Derek Parfit is wrong. (2) I find myself in substantial agreement with. And (1) I enthusiastically endorse—and note its inconsistency with (4).

But even so I wound up unsatisfied with the book qua-book, and not because I think differently from MacAskill. I think each of his arguments would be much better if Will had given himself space to spread out. I wish he had written five books, each of 300 pages. I would have greatly enjoyed reading them all.

Perhapsthe odds I would wind up agreeing with any of them would have been higher if Will had been able to make his arguments at greater length.

The first book, on empowering the future, I would hand it to people, saying: this is near gospel. I think the only major disagreement I would have with it is with Will MacAskill’s belief that having and raising children is among the very best things for humanity one could do. Perhaps he could convince me if he made the argument at greater length, but I doubt it. I cannot buy his conclusion that the best world is one with many many many more people than the one we are in. This is not to say that I have strong and informed views on what the size of the human population should be. But I do know I gravely doubt anyone who thinks that they know this.

The second book—on how to make human civilization resilient—would get my enthusiastic endorsement and unqualified approbation (save for what I see as an excessive “Robot Uprising” tick).

The third book—on Derek Parfit’s utilitarianism—would, I think, be the best written and the clearest. Will should write it! The world needs an introduction to Derek Parfit! But I would finish it unconvinced, for I find Parfit’s pushing the boundaries of utilitarianism terribly unconvincing. I read Parfit. I find myself thinking: Sometimes it is just atoms in the void, sometimes it is dancing points of light with transcendental meaning, and it switches from one to the other by rules I do not grok. So I think: If I could switch from “atoms in the void” lane to “dancing points of light with transcendental meaning” lane whenever I wanted, I can prove anything! So I am left unsatisfied. For to prove everything is to do nothing useful.

Let me hasten to say that this does mean that Parfit is a bad philosopher, or has failed to do something he should have done.

As I said at the top: philosophy.

I have, perhaps, bigger problems with the other two books whose stapled-together 60-page prospectuses make up What We Owe the Future.

The fourth book—that the future is very important, and because we can have extraordinary influence over it we should prioritize working for humanity in the future over working for humanity today—I simply do not believe. Yes, we should guard against human extinction and civilizational collapse in our day. But people in the future have agency too. To say that right now humanity’s being is uniquely plastic, and thus what we do in our generation shapes the future to he end of time, and that the most important segment of humans alive today shaping the future are moral philosophers—well, that is such a stunningly grandiose denial of the Principle of Mediocrity that I find myself unable to credit it at all. We are but one link in a very long chain, even if unusual in the pace at which humanity’s wealth is increasing. We are almost surely not the only link that matters.

And as for the fifth book, the “Artificial General Intelligence the Biggest Menace” prospectus—this I do not understand at all. Where does this bizarre flowering of the TechBro mindset come from? Is it from people who had issues with their fathers? Is it a strange mutation of High Calvinist TULIP theology, with Robot put into the place of God? I do not grok it at all.

This has turned out to be crankier than I wanted it to be. So let me close by saying that I found reading What We Owe the Future to be enormous fun, and that if Will MacAskill had spread out and written all five books I would have had much more fun.

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ONE VIDEO: Martin Wolf: What’s þe Matter wiþ Britain?

The country strategy could entail… lifesciences and IT… a financial center… [as] a tax haven… a European “bridge to Asia.”… Current account deficit… a challenge…. Perceptions lag behind reality. The country also suffers from nostalgia for past grandeur. The Brexit debate reflected these realities. Yet, despite this, Britain’s democracy is healthier than that of the US…. Britain was hard hit by the financial crisis. GDP per head in 2019 was about 21% lower than the pre-crisis trend…. Following the Covid shock, the UK is the only G7 economy that is still below its pre-pandemic size…

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ONE IMAGE: Þis Is, I Think, þe Best “Where We Are” Map:

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Oþer Things Þt Went Whizzing by…

Very Briefly Noted:

• Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman: Why India Can’t Replace China: ‘The Barriers to New Delhi’s Next Boom…. Will New Delhi be able to seize this opportunity? The answer is not obvious…. Radical policy changes are needed before India can revive domestic investment, much less convince large numbers of global businesses to move their production there...

• Doug Irwin: Most developing economies reduced tariffs voluntarily, not because of trade agreements: ‘The World Bank, the IMF, and the GATT/WTO: Which institution most supported trade reform in developing economies?…

• Ethan Mollick: The Mechanical Professor: ‘Rather than automating jobs that are repetitive & dangerous, there is now the prospect that the first jobs that are disrupted by AI will be more analytic; creative; and involve more writing and communication…. I wanted to see how much of my work an AI could do right now...

• Scott Lemieux: The imaginary right to post: ‘Adam Serwer explains the idiotic assumptions underlying the premise that it somehow violates the First Amendment to request that revenge porn be taken off the internet, if that revenge porn is part of a Republican ratfucking campaign…

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¶s:

If one is going to earn-to-give, one should first make sure that one is not a destructive grifter. Effective charities are good. Purchase of Wytham Abbey is a serious danger sign:

Ezra Klein: The Big Thing Effective Altruism (Still) Gets Right: ‘This is my annual giving column, so I won’t beat around the bush. I recommend donating to GiveWell’s four top-rated charities: the Malaria Consortium, the Against Malaria Foundation, Helen Keller International and New Incentives. These charities distribute medication and bed nets to prevent malaria, vitamin A supplements to prevent blindness and death in children and cash to get poor kids vaccinated against a host of diseases. What sets these groups apart is the confidence we have in the good that they do…. Effective altruism, the philanthropic movement that GiveWell is part of, is undergoing a reckoning after the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, its most famous financier and adherent… [who] became a crypto trader after lunching with Will MacAskill, an Oxford philosopher who’s one of effective altruism’s founders. MacAskill told Bankman-Fried he could probably do more good by making a lot of money and giving it away than by working in a nonprofit somewhere… earn to give...

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Eric Williams looks pretty good these days, no?

Stephan Heblich, Stephen J. Redding, & Hans-Joachim Voth: Slavery & the British Industrial Revolution: ‘We compare areas of Britain with high and low exposure to the colonial plantation economy…. By the 1830s, slavery wealth is strongly correlated with economic development…. Slavery investment raises the return to capital accumulation, expanding production in capital-intensive sectors…. Weather shocks influenced the continued involvement of ancestors in the slave trade; weather-induced slave mortality of slave-trading ancestors in each area is strongly predictive of slaveholding in 1833…. Britain would have been substantially poorer and more agricultural in the absence of overseas slave wealth...