Better Futures

Suppose we want the future to go better. What should we do?

One approach is to avoid near-term catastrophes, like human extinction. This essay series explores a different, complementary, approach: improving on futures where we survive, to achieve a truly great future.

How big is the target we need to hit to reach a mostly great future? We argue that, on most plausible views, only a narrow range of futures meet this bar, and even common-sense utopias miss out on almost all their potential.

Even if the target is narrow, will there be forces which nonetheless hone in on near-best futures? We argue society is unlikely to converge on them by default. Trade and compromise make eutopias seem more achievable, but still we should expect ‘default’ outcomes to fall far short.

Over sufficiently long time horizons, will the effects of actions to improve the quality of the future just ‘wash out’? Against this view, I argue a number of plausible near-term events will have persistent and predictable path-dependent effects on the value of the future.

I suggest a number of concrete actions we can take now to make the future go better.

How do we compare working on reducing catastrophe with improving the quality of the future? We introduce a simple model (EV ≈ S*F) and use the 'scale, neglectedness, tractability' framework to argue that improving Flourishing is of comparable priority to increasing the chance of Surviving.