Masrani says that ālongtermism encourages us to treat our fellow brothers and sisters with careless disregard for the next one thousand years, foreverā. But strong longtermism being true now doesnāt mean it always was true and always will be true, as Greaves and Macaskill themselves note.
Masrani writes:
The monumental asymmetry between the present and future that the longtermists seem to be missing is that the present moves with us, while the future never arrives. Concretely, this means that longtermism encourages us to treat our fellow brothers and sisters with careless disregard for the next one thousand years, forever. There will always be the next one thousand years.
But Greaves and MacAskillās paper explicitly notes that longtermism depends on surprising empirical facts that would not always be true, and that strong longtermism may not have held in the past.
Also, Greaves and MacAskillās discussion of attractor states provides one obvious way in which strong longtermism could stop being true in future.
I.e., if we reach an attractor state (e.g., extinction, or lock-in of a good future), the future from that point onwards will then be far harder to influence, which would presumably very much weaken the case for strong longtermism at that point.
The case for strong longtermism would also tend to become less compelling as the ratio between the total size of the present and near-term generations and the total size of the far future generations grows larger (unless this is offset by increased ability to influence the future and or predict influence).
This ratio will grow larger as our civilization expands and as we progress towards some āunchangeable limits of the universeā.
At some point, our better ability to influence the near term will presumably outweigh the larger size of the future.
Masrani says that ālongtermism encourages us to treat our fellow brothers and sisters with careless disregard for the next one thousand years, foreverā. But strong longtermism being true now doesnāt mean it always was true and always will be true, as Greaves and Macaskill themselves note.
Masrani writes:
But Greaves and MacAskillās paper explicitly notes that longtermism depends on surprising empirical facts that would not always be true, and that strong longtermism may not have held in the past.
Also, Greaves and MacAskillās discussion of attractor states provides one obvious way in which strong longtermism could stop being true in future.
I.e., if we reach an attractor state (e.g., extinction, or lock-in of a good future), the future from that point onwards will then be far harder to influence, which would presumably very much weaken the case for strong longtermism at that point.
The case for strong longtermism would also tend to become less compelling as the ratio between the total size of the present and near-term generations and the total size of the far future generations grows larger (unless this is offset by increased ability to influence the future and or predict influence).
This ratio will grow larger as our civilization expands and as we progress towards some āunchangeable limits of the universeā.
At some point, our better ability to influence the near term will presumably outweigh the larger size of the future.