Longtermists have pointed out that we’ve often failed to consider the interests or wellbeing of future beings. But an even more neglected space is the past.
If we think that existential risk is sufficiently high in the near future, there is a good chance that the vast majority of moral value is in the past. Just considering humans, there are at least 300,000 years of experiences, all of which we ought to consider just as important as present day ones. If we consider non-humans’ interests, there are billions of years and countless individuals who we ought to expand our moral circle to include.
The scale here is obvious, as is the neglectedness—as far as I am aware, there are no groups focused on ensuring that the past is as good as possible. So, how tractable is it?
Immediately, a handful of interventions come to find:
Cultivating expert backcasting:
Written history is just a few thousand years old, and unfortunately, a lot of it is incredibly sad. But prior to around 5,500 years ago, we have little data on what human lives were like. By improving our backcasting ability, we can ensure that documentation of these lives in the prehistoric world states they were as good as possible.
Making sure there were no existential catastrophes
If a x-risk is bad right now, it stands to reason that it might have been even worse had it occurred in the past. We might be able to verify that existential catastrophes did not happen previously, preventing the flourishing of both present day and future humans.
One immediate advantage of reversetermism is that cost-effectiveness can actually be estimated relatively accurately. Here’s a simple test:
“On May 5th (Gregorian calendar), 10,560 BC, at 2:00pm Eastern, everything was chill for an hour for everybody.”
This expert backcasting took around 12 seconds to produce. Assuming a human population of 2 million, and that you pay expert backcasters $30 USD / hour, this cost $0.10, and created around 228 years of good experiences. With an average lifespan of say 30 years, it costs around $0.013 to save a life. And even more expert backcasters might achieve more efficient results through further work in the field, driving down the cost-effectiveness further.
Working title: Reversetermism
Longtermists have pointed out that we’ve often failed to consider the interests or wellbeing of future beings. But an even more neglected space is the past.
If we think that existential risk is sufficiently high in the near future, there is a good chance that the vast majority of moral value is in the past. Just considering humans, there are at least 300,000 years of experiences, all of which we ought to consider just as important as present day ones. If we consider non-humans’ interests, there are billions of years and countless individuals who we ought to expand our moral circle to include.
The scale here is obvious, as is the neglectedness—as far as I am aware, there are no groups focused on ensuring that the past is as good as possible. So, how tractable is it?
Immediately, a handful of interventions come to find:
Cultivating expert backcasting:
Written history is just a few thousand years old, and unfortunately, a lot of it is incredibly sad. But prior to around 5,500 years ago, we have little data on what human lives were like. By improving our backcasting ability, we can ensure that documentation of these lives in the prehistoric world states they were as good as possible.
Making sure there were no existential catastrophes
If a x-risk is bad right now, it stands to reason that it might have been even worse had it occurred in the past. We might be able to verify that existential catastrophes did not happen previously, preventing the flourishing of both present day and future humans.
One immediate advantage of reversetermism is that cost-effectiveness can actually be estimated relatively accurately. Here’s a simple test:
“On May 5th (Gregorian calendar), 10,560 BC, at 2:00pm Eastern, everything was chill for an hour for everybody.”
This expert backcasting took around 12 seconds to produce. Assuming a human population of 2 million, and that you pay expert backcasters $30 USD / hour, this cost $0.10, and created around 228 years of good experiences. With an average lifespan of say 30 years, it costs around $0.013 to save a life. And even more expert backcasters might achieve more efficient results through further work in the field, driving down the cost-effectiveness further.
You neglect to mention that with a time preference discount rate high enough, the past counts disproportionately more than the future. As they say, “Tutankhamun was a billion times more important than you”.