I’ve been spending a lot of time reading and thinking about extending ethics — specifically, the possible answers to the question, “What should I do?” — from a personal level to the level of groups of individuals, up to the level of the entirety of humankind and beyond. My thinking on this subject is largely based on my idea of desire satisfaction as a reasonable basis for moral thinking, as well as the sort of thinking that underlies the traditional economic analysis of well-being, which is strongly rooted in utilitarianism. My interest in this stems both from a personal fascination, almost an obsession, with thinking carefully about what I should spend my time and resources doing (How is it that everyone is not constantly asking this question?), and from my professional stake in understanding how people go about translating their preferences into action and how these individual preferences and actions interact on a larger scale to produce the sophisticated social mechanics of communities, nations, and international bodies: I am about to be submerged full time in rigorous study whose theoretical underpinnings rely on specific, technical assumptions about how all this works, so it only makes sense to carefully consider how appropriate those assumptions are and how we can reasonably translate the positive declarations of empirical economic analysis (and scientific investigation more generally) into normative statements about what we should collectively be using our finite resources for. Specifically, I want to carefully consider what the priorities of human society should be and how I can use my own resources and aptitudes to contribute to those priorities.
(Note: unless you like mathematizing everything like I do, you might want to just skim this section and get on to the content below.)
As I have written before, a good starting point for this sort of thinking is to ask, “What is it that I want?” and then orient one’s actions in such as a way as to achieve the state of being that best satisfies those wants. This is very similar to the general approach used in microeconomic theory, where individuals are assumed to have a set of well-behaved preferences that can be assumed to be modeled by a “utility function” that assigns a state of well-being to every possible collection of resources and circumstances a person may have. A basket of goods is associated with a higher value of a given person’s utility function if and only if that person’s well-being is higher with that basket of goods. This mathematical formalization of preferences is used to quantitatively describe the ways in which people interact and form markets to exchange goods so as to maximize their individual utilities.
It is one thing to analyze the ways, in line with my proposed framework, that people go about satisfying their desires, or the ways, according to the standard microeconomic model, that the simultaneous efforts of individuals to maximize their utilities give rise to a system of prices and exchange of goods, but it is quite another thing to take these ideas and use them to say something about how the states of well-being of the people comprising a social group are related to the collective well-being of the society that they constitute. One idea I have proposed as a way of thinking about this is to take the natural extension of the desire satisfaction model and assert that social groups should act in such a way as to achieve the “desires” expressed by the group “consciousness” (i.e. the ideas expressed via conversation within the group) — that is, to assume that the collective well-being of a social group is increased by pursuing actions that place the group more in line with the desires expressed by the combined voices of the group, with the converse also being true. The difficulty is, of course, figuring out how exactly the disparate expressed opinions of a group combine to form a collective voice, but this is of course also a difficulty on the personal level — how do the various voices within one’s own head combine to give an experience of conscious identity? This same difficulty has been noted by economic theorists in their preference- and utility-based model. On the individual level, the standard economic model does not allow for a person holding contradictory or otherwise inconsistent preferences, simultaneous sets of distinct preferences, or preferences that change significantly over time (although I have tried to address some of those problems in my own thinking). On the collective level, economic thinkers have gone so far as to prove that, under certain assumptions, it is mathematically impossible to construct a system for transforming individual preferences into a consistent set of preferences for the group as a whole (roughly, there is no perfect ranked-choice voting system). The situation is a bit less bleak if the assumptions involved are relaxed a bit (and the literature surrounding this problem is really quite interesting), but the fact remains that the way in which individual preferences/states of well-being should be agglomerated is far from obvious. Even so, I think it is still in many cases reasonable to make some basic assertions about what social groups want and what they should do to move toward those wants. The rest of this essay is an exploration of what it is possible to say about the collective desires of all of humanity and what I think we ought to do to maximize our chances of fulfilling those desires.
As detailed above, it is hard to say in a rigorous and exact fashion what human society wants on most issues, but I can propose some basic wants based on desires that are commonly held by most people and/or frequently show up in public discourse:
This list is not intended to be exhaustive, but I think it provides a reasonable foundation to explain most of the human dynamics we see in global events and to provide a starting point for answering the question, “What should we do?”
I want to paint a mental image of what could be possible, what human society might roughly look like if we managed to robustly satisfy the collective desires I’ve listed above. This is by no means a novel exercise: people have been imagining up utopias probably since stories have been told. However, I think this is a worthwhile train of thought, as it can help us determine what we should be working toward and start to consider what we ought to be doing right now to get ourselves there.
First, to satisfy the desire to survive, we need to still be around. This seems quite obvious but may be easier said than done. I’ll consider some specific ways that things could go wrong here in the next section.
Given that humankind is still extant in our hypothetical future, the things necessary to satisfy the other collective desires I’ve proposed are for the most part intertwined and complementary, although some are a bit at odds with each other. If we manage to continue improving production-related technology to the point where we can efficiently and sustainably make use of raw materials and available labor, it is possible that humanity may, in the future, exist in a post-scarcity economy. Individuals living in such a situation would be principally concerned not with making a living, but with pursuing goals, activities, and relationships that give them pleasure, and — importantly — provide them with a sense of meaning. It is likely that most essential production would be automated, with robotic systems proving much more effective and cost-efficient than humans at performing most (if not all) tasks; although people would likely still pursue some sort of work as a type of meaning-making, such work would not be strictly necessary.
I am of the persuasion that automation technology can potentially progress to the point where computers can cognitively exceed humans substantially in every respect — any argument to the contrary seems to hinge on the assumption that there is something special about the human mind that can not be replicated mechanistically, but I see no reason why this would be the case: the brain is a fantastically complicated physical system but still a physical system — because of this, machines may not only be the means of production for society but also the principal scientists, engineers, and decision makers. This does not mean that the course of society would run contrary to the interests of human kind, since, with sufficient care, it is reasonable to believe that the thinking machines could be in the first place designed to act in the interest of the human race, hopefully even better than if humans were still directly in charge. People would likely also still be heavily involved in scholarly, constructive, and creative tasks — just because someone or something else can do something better than you doesn’t mean that you doing that thing isn’t still worthwhile or at the very least entertaining. Humans would, every day, produce incredible creative works far exceeding anything we see today.
Medical technology would have reached the point where disease had been essentially eradicated, and humans could prolong their lives as long as desired. We would be experts at maintaining excellent mental health, ensuring that people would not be detoured from well-being by unwanted and unavoidable maladies of the mind. Some of these advances would, perhaps, be facilitated by genetic engineering of human biology itself, although before tampering with our own makeup we would certainly want to consider carefully whether the changes we made were in fact in line with our long-term desires.
With practically unlimited resources, overpopulation would not be too much of a concern, so the human race could potentially keep growing. Individuals and couples could choose to have and raise children, although their skill at child-rearing and the resources available to support them in doing so would be much greater than is typical today. Again, because the principal task of people would be meaning-making, and close relationships are an important source of meaning, romantic, platonic, and family relationships would still play a key part in people’s lives.
Various human rights would be guaranteed to all people (probably something like the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but adapted to the specific concerns of the time). In general, institutions would be set up to provide equality of opportunity in a Rawlsian sense. It is likely that many people would still follow religious traditions, although the beliefs associated with those religions would evolve over time to be compatible with a highly knowledgeable, liberal, and technologically advanced society.
Talking about possible utopian states does little good without a plan to get there and an understanding of the possible road blocks along the way. After all, the numerous attempts made to establish the perfect society have to this point dissolved or, often, ended in disaster — Sir Thomas More was unintentionally prescient in coining the name “Utopia” after the Greek for “no place.” I can identity a few ways in which we may be derailed before reaching the sort of state I described in the previous section. We should take these threats seriously and make efforts now to avoid them.
Humanity faces several existential threats that could lead to its extinction or at least to its irreversible dwindling. Some thinkers have suggested that we are currently facing a critical period during with such existential threats are especially pressing, making the task of addressing these issues right now very important. Natural disasters like meteor strikes, volcanoes, or even natural pandemics are unlikely to make us go extinct (though they can obviously cause significant suffering). Somewhat perversely, the greatest threats we face come from ourselves. Nuclear war, although still unlikely to totally annihilate us, could easily come very close and certainly cause unprecedented destruction; despite a decline in the attention paid to it since the Cold War, this threat is perhaps more pressing than ever before and deserves our attention. Man-made pathogens could also prove much more dangerous than naturally occurring ones and could lead to our extinction. Climate change is set to lead to very costly problems down the road; again, this probably won’t drive us extinct, but it might, and it deserves attention in any case. One threat that many people may be unaware of, but nonetheless is making some very smart people quite concerned, is the potential for superintelligent artificial intelligences to go awry, start acting against our best interests, and destroy or otherwise incapacitate us. This admittedly sounds like science fiction, but given that it is an unprecedented threat and that our future society will very likely rely heavily on intelligent machines, it seems that significant caution is merited.
I should note that none of the above-listed threats are guaranteed to materialize. However, if we think probabilistically and consider how bad it would be if they did happen, we realize that they deserve way more attention than they’re currently getting.
Even if we don’t go extinct, it is still possible that we might fail to continue progressing technologically a point where we can achieve the future I have imagined. There are lots of reasons why this could happen — for example, any of the extinction threats above could also just set humanity back to a point where further technological progress is impossible, our institutions could decay to a point where they are not efficient enough to produce new innovations but still somehow stable enough to persist, or we may have just already picked all the low-hanging scientific fruit. It already seems to be the case that technological progress has been slowing down in the past few decades, and future growth may be much more difficult than it has been since the start of the industrial revolution. We should look carefully into the causes of possible stagnation and reform our institutions to address them. Perhaps the best place to start is by reforming the educational and academic institutions to actually teach effectively and to incentivize groundbreaking research instead of persisting in centuries-old hierarchical structures and processes that require endless hoop-jumping.
A worrisome trend I have seen over the past couple of decades, fomented especially by the internet, is the derailment of human psychology in favor of the endless consumption of goods whose impact on our well-being is not obviously positive. I see lots of people wondering whether services like social media are actually net positives — most of these worries focus on the impact of those services on individual mental health and productivity (certainly worth paying attention to!), but those effects are only some of the ways in which technology may affect our long-term potential to create a healthier and more robust society. We have already seen how the resource-extraction technologies of the past century have blighted the planet; shouldn’t we have learned our lesson to be more careful with deploying transformative technologies when our collective future is on the line?
I don’t want to be misunderstood: I am strongly in favor of technological progress, but only insofar as it actually constitutes progress — that is, as far as it promotes our collective well-being and moves us closer to the goals I have outlined above. The internet and other modern innovations do make possible many services I find to be incredibly useful (shout out to my friend Wikipedia), but at the same time it is unclear to me how services that allow us to wile away our time reading hollow jokes and to constantly feel inferior to the air-brushed celebrities and “influencers” that have suddenly come to be neighbors with us in our (virtual) communities are a step in the right direction. The most successful online tech companies use clever and sophisticated “machine learning” algorithms to get a detailed idea of users’ interests and preferences so they can more effectively tug on our emotions and market us more goods of questionable worth. Surely we can find better uses for these innovations?
We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
Peter Thiel
Even if we manage to dodge all of the obstacles mentioned so far, we may still not be completely in the clear. Selfish interests may still deter us from our goal. After all, the idealistic visions of many of the past projects meant to better the lot of mankind were turned sour in part because of the excessive concentration of power and subsequent abuse of that power.
Wealth inequality has received a lot of attention in the U.S. in recent years, and, while the issue is more complicated than is commonly portrayed in mainstream treatments of the subject, it is still quite clear that something has changed about the modern economic system that leads to some individuals possessing outrageous monetary power. Although there may be some advantages to some individuals having such power — for example, people like Bill and Melinda Gates perform charitable work at a larger scale and more efficiently than any government group I am aware of — the current situation is still concerning and can only be expected to intensify as globalization continues and improved technology increasingly rewards holders of capital more than laborers. The former factor — globalization — does seem to be facing friction from things like Brexit and Trump-style isolationism, but the actions of nations like China and the increasing interconnectedness of everything facilitated by the internet suggest that the march of global economic entanglement will continue. The latter factor — automation of labor — seems slated to be an even greater contributor to wealth inequality, and one that is not likely to slack off anytime soon. As I’ve already mentioned, humans will increasingly find themselves outmoded by machines in their occupations, and whoever owns the machines will find themselves rolling in the dough. It is a mistake to think that anyone’s job is immune to automation: even highly-educated workers could find themselves replaced by the next generation of pseudo-intelligent machines. Absent carefully-designed public policy to fairly distribute the new machine-generated wealth, I’m worried that we may find ourselves facing a dystopian scene of subjugation by the capital-holding elite. On the other hand, if we can avoid that scenario, the potentially gains to the whole of humanity are immense.
Humanity’s future lies along a path promising both great rewards and formidable obstacles. If we can successfully navigate the obstacles in our way, we can arrive at a future characterized by pleasant, meaningful, and healthy lives; guaranteed rights and opportunities; great wealth; great technical and cultural achievements; and, overall, widespread moral achievement, whatever that may mean for the humans of the time.
—
If you enjoyed this essay and want to think more carefully about these issues and be involved in making a better future, here are some resources I’ve found helpful: