Jargogled Impressions.

I finished this book recently called “The Precipice” by Toby Ord and while I did not appreciate the full content, the subject matter was of immense interest to me. I have found myself (finally!) drawn to sci-fiction and IMO this book is sort of like a non-fiction-sci-fiction, whatever that means. It’s sci-fi because it goes ultra-long term in the future, and yet it’s not fiction because it is grounded in the realities of what we know now and where we are today.

Long termism is the practice of thinking long-term. No, not the long-term you would consider natural – the next year, the next decade, or this life. The long-term here is of the future of humanity thousands or millions of years in the future.

Think long-term and then extend that another million years.

It’s hard to think of long-term as-is, and to do so for people and species so far into the future is exponentially so. So, what gives?

The author thinks we are at the precipice, at the edge, at the tipping point of when our decisions today can make a dramatically different outcome for the generations to come. Owing mostly to anthropogenic risks (those driven by our hubris, and our own actions), the risks over the past few centuries have compounded to such an extent that we are at the juncture of stopping or steamrolling an existential risk for our collective destiny as a species.

There’s more to this theory than meets the eye. In fact, the author believes we stand 1 in 6 chances of us vanishing in the dust of cosmic irrelevance if we don’t mend our ways, are more careful about what we wish for, take technology for what it is – a double edged sword, and be aware of what actions we all can take – even if insignificant and absurdly so. That the man-made risks (global warming, human-engineered pandemic, AI, nuclear Armageddon, etc.) pose more risk than natural ones (asteroid attack, earthquake, etc.) is surprising to me but I guess they are inter-linked too deeply for the distinction to stand ground. Our actions today will have a systemic impact on the environment we live in – the fundamental thesis of human beings is to mold and engineer the world we live in to suit our needs – and changes that we thrust on this will have repercussions and changes that we are in no way capable of estimating. It is here that the pseudo-quantitative probability estimates of existential everything (catastrophe, failed continuation, unrecoverable collapse, unrecoverable dystopia) in the book was too precision that my head or heart could handle. Yet, the book has its place in the human oeuvre – it succeeds in sparking a conversation on long-termism. But what actions we can take now is not the focus in this book and maybe rightly so because our motivations would be so atomically miniscule that it would be hard to generalize in a book.

I think sci-fi books do a better job at viscerally making us experience what an existential catastrophe would look like. Having just read Emily St. John Mandel (Sea of Tranquility, Station Eleven) – I cannot recommend her highly enough. Small, light reads, these sci-fi books from Mandel is a great exposure to empathize with those souls far out in the future.

IMO the long-termism theory attracts those who find themselves insufficiently saturated with the intellectual firehose of the here and now, and who are wont to think expansively, and cosmically so. Yet, there is an egalitarian philosophy here, striving to decide what life actually means. If you don’t care about the future of humanity so far into the future, what does life mean to you, if anything at all?

There is an idea that long-termism finds itself undesirably tethered to – effective altruism. My opinion alone – but the strong utilitarianist roots of both of these realms of sub-culture drive this, not to mention also that the author has been an instrumental part of shining the light on EA too.

It’s by sheer coincidence that I picked this book while also starting on “What we owe the future” by William MacAskill. MacAskill’s book has toured the vaunted spheres of influencer attention – encouraged by none other than Elon Musk as an important read. And EA was something I had heard off hand too – so I picked this one up expecting a moral tour de force on something that I believe in anyways. Side note: this makes me wonder how much of my reading choices tend to become a self-reinforcing mechanism. But more on this later. I ended up going to a book club too to discuss Ord’s book too and came away learning a lot – primarily due to the diversity of opinions, of takeaways, and of framing of the book. I need to remind myself that purely reading books may not bring you the range of opinions and understanding that you need to get a better grasp of the subject matter. Talking to fellow humans can unlock new areas of understanding and of your own blind spots. I do hope to go to more of these book club discussions, especially on subjects that I find myself drawn towards.

A few notable learnings for me:

• Personal experiences heavily influence your alignment to a thorny and morally ambiguous problem: should we care about people far out in the future, or should we focus all our attention on the struggles of the present?
• Personal choices are often validated and reinforced through what you read and how you interpret it: our past choices, especially the one-way door types, are what we have to live with. We often end up relying on books or fonts of external wisdom to derive validation on these choices for better or worse.
• Readers come in all shapes and sizes, some approach books through an analytical mindset, and others approach it emotionally. The left-brain reader and the right-brain reader so to speak.
• I fall prey to this a lot – using books as virtue-signaling mediums – but have tried to cut it down to a minimum. But it isn’t as easy for over-doing it means you end up in an echo-chamber of your own interpretations of the book you read. Still better than reading nothing, but none the wiser. Especially if you aim to understand and not accomplish. Side note: do read How to talk about books you haven’t read by Pierre Bayard for a tongue-in-cheek account of what “non-reading” means.