A Brief Argument for the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future
A Brief Argument for the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future
In this chapter, Nick Beckstead argues that the best available interventions gain most of their expected value via the effects that they have on the long-run future, rather than via their more immediate effects. Because of the vastness of humanity’s possible future, this line of argument tends to favour actions that reduce risks of premature extinction, and actions that increase probabilities of other significantly beneficial “trajectory changes” to the course of humanity’s long-run future, even where the change in probabilities that we are able to bring about is very small.
Keywords: existential risk, long-termism, population ethics, person-affecting views, temporal discounting, far future
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