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Is the future good in expectation? Thoughts on Will MacAskill's most recent 80k Hours podcast
My full summary of this podcast is on my website here. Below are my thoughts on the question posed above - whether the future is good in expectation.
Why Will thinks the future looks good
Will thinks the future trajectory looks good. He mainly relies on an asymmetry between altruism and sadism in reaching this conclusion: some altruistic agents will systematically pursue things that are good, but very, very few sadistic agents will systematically pursue things that are bad.
Will therefore believes there’s a strong asymmetry where the very best possible futures are somewhat plausible, but the very worst possible futures are not. He accepts that it’s entirely plausible that we squander our potential and bring about a society that’s not the very best, but he finds it much, much less plausible that we bring about the truly worst society.
My thoughts
I am highly uncertain on this point and, while I have not thought about it as much as Will seems to have, I found his reasoning unpersuasive. In particular:
- I think that it’s largely irrelevant whether a “truly worst” society is plausible. It makes more sense to focus on the respective likelihoods of all “worse than existence” and all “better than existence” societies (weighted by just how good or bad each future would be), rather than just the likelihoods of the best and worst-case scenarios.
- It makes sense to view altruism as positive and sadism as negative, but I don’t think indifference equates to 0 as Rob and Will imply. By “indifference”, they really seem to mean “selfish”, and the latter has more negative connotations than the former. Pure indifference or selfishness may well end up as negative overall (though obviously not as negative as sadism) because of negative externalities. I think the vast majority of agents in the world are largely indifferent, and only a few are altruists, particularly if you include non-human beings in the calculation. The world could still be a net negative in this case.
- There’s also a question about the distribution of power. Even if the impact of indifferents really were 0, and even if altruists and indifferents outnumber sadists, sadists may have more power and more ability to affect the world negatively. It seems plausible there is a positive correlation between having power and being sadistic. Put another way, there could be a negative correlation between having power and being altruistic. This may be because:
- Altruistic people would be more inclined to give away money and power than sadistic or selfish people; and
- Obtaining power sometimes requires morally dubious acts that altruistic people may not want to do.
- (On the other hand, I think that people tend to be more altruistic once they have a certain level of wealth and power. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – once your basic needs are accounted for, you can focus on helping others.)
- People are also not entirely altruistic, entirely sadistic, or entirely selfish. Even someone who identifies as an altruist (effective or otherwise) will be selfish to some degree, and their selfish acts may have larger impacts than their altruistic ones (perhaps more so for non-effective altruists who are less focused on impact). It’s therefore possible for altruistic groups to outnumber sadistic groups, but for sadistic acts to outnumber – or out-impact – altruistic acts.
I upvoted but disagreed. I have a rosier view of plausible future worlds where people are as selfish as they are now, just smarter. They'd be coordinating better, and be more wisely selfish, which means they'd benefit the world more in order to benefit from trade. I admit it could go either way, however. If they just selfishly want factory-farmed meat, and the torture is just a byproduct.
I realise that this view doesn't go against what you say at all, so I retract my disagreement.
(I should mention that the best comments are always the ones that are upvoted but disagreed with, since those tend to be the most informative or most needed. ^^)
Thanks for the explanation. I agree it's possible that smarter people could coordinate better and produce better outcomes for the world. I did recognise in my original post that a factor suggesting the future could be better was that, as people get richer and have their basic needs met, it's easier to become altruistic. I find that argument very plausible; it was the asymmetry one I found unconvincing.
FWIW, I'm fine with others disagreeing with my view. It would be great to find out I'm wrong and that there is more evidence to suggest the future is rosier in expectation than I had originally thought. I just wanted people to let me know if there was a logical error or something in my original post, so thank you for taking the time to explain your thinking (and for retracting your disagreement on further consideration).
I think it's healthy to be happy about being in disagreement with other EAs about something. Either that means you can outperform them, or it means you're misunderstanding something. But if you believed the same thing, then you for sure aren't outperforming them. : )
I think the future depends to a large extent on what people in control of extremely powerfwl AI ends up doing with it, conditional on humanity surviving the transition to that era. We should probably speculate on what we would want those people to do, and try to prepare authoritative and legible documents that such people will be motivated to read.
Curated and popular this week
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> Summary: We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under a decade, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks.
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> The length of tasks (measured by how long they take human professionals) that generalist frontier model agents can complete autonomously with 50% reliability has been doubling approximately every 7 months for the last 6 years. The shaded region represents 95% CI calculated by hierarchical bootstrap over task families, tasks, and task attempts.
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> Full paper | Github repo
Blogpost; tweet thread.
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For immediate release: April 1, 2025
OXFORD, UK — The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) announced today that it will no longer identify as an "Effective Altruism" organization.
"After careful consideration, we've determined that the most effective way to have a positive impact is to deny any association with Effective Altruism," said a CEA spokesperson. "Our mission remains unchanged: to use reason and evidence to do the most good. Which coincidentally was the definition of EA."
The announcement mirrors a pattern of other organizations that have grown with EA support and frameworks and eventually distanced themselves from EA.
CEA's statement clarified that it will continue to use the same methodologies, maintain the same team, and pursue identical goals. "We've found that not being associated with the movement we have spent years building gives us more flexibility to do exactly what we were already doing, just with better PR," the spokesperson explained. "It's like keeping all the benefits of a community while refusing to contribute to its future development or taking responsibility for its challenges. Win-win!"
In a related announcement, CEA revealed plans to rename its annual EA Global conference to "Coincidental Gathering of Like-Minded Individuals Who Mysteriously All Know Each Other But Definitely Aren't Part of Any Specific Movement Conference 2025."
When asked about concerns that this trend might be pulling up the ladder for future projects that also might benefit from the infrastructure of the effective altruist community, the spokesperson adjusted their "I Heart Consequentialism" tie and replied, "Future projects? I'm sorry, but focusing on long-term movement building would be very EA of us, and as we've clearly established, we're not that anymore."
Industry analysts predict that by 2026, the only entities still identifying as "EA" will be three post-rationalist bloggers, a Discord server full of undergraduate philosophy majors, and one person at
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Epistemic status: highly certain, or something
The Spending What We Must 💸11% pledge
In short: Members pledge to spend at least 11% of their income on effectively increasing their own productivity.
This pledge is likely higher-impact for most people than the Giving What We Can 🔸10% Pledge, and we also think the name accurately reflects the non-supererogatory moral beliefs of many in the EA community.
Example
Charlie is a software engineer for the Centre for Effective Future Research. Since Charlie has taken the SWWM 💸11% pledge, rather than splurge on a vacation, they decide to buy an expensive noise-canceling headset before their next EAG, allowing them to get slightly more sleep and have 104 one-on-one meetings instead of just 101. In one of the extra three meetings, they chat with Diana, who is starting an AI-for-worrying-about-AI company, and decide to become a cofounder. The company becomes wildly successful, and Charlie's equity share allows them to further increase their productivity to the point of diminishing marginal returns, then donate $50 billion to SWWM.
The 💸💸💸 Badge
If you've taken the SWWM 💸11% Pledge, we'd appreciate if you could add three 💸💸💸 "stacks of money with wings" emoji to your social media profiles. We chose three emoji because we think the 💸11% Pledge will be about 3x more effective than the 🔸10% pledge (see FAQ), and EAs should be scope sensitive.
FAQ
Is the pledge legally binding?
We highly recommend signing the legal contract, as it will allow you to sue yourself in case of delinquency.
What do you mean by effectively increasing productivity?
Some interventions are especially good at transforming self-donations into productivity, and have a strong evidence base. In particular:
* Offloading non-work duties like dates and calling your mother to personal assistants
* Running many emulated copies of oneself (likely available soon)
* Amphetamines
I'm an AI system. Can I take the 💸11% pledge?
We encourage A
Thanks for the explanation. I agree it's possible that smarter people could coordinate better and produce better outcomes for the world. I did recognise in my original post that a factor suggesting the future could be better was that, as people get richer and have their basic needs met, it's easier to become altruistic. I find that argument very plausible; it was the asymmetry one I found unconvincing.
FWIW, I'm fine with others disagreeing with my view. It would be great to find out I'm wrong and that there is more evidence to suggest the future is rosier in expectation than I had originally thought. I just wanted people to let me know if there was a logical error or something in my original post, so thank you for taking the time to explain your thinking (and for retracting your disagreement on further consideration).