5. What could the future hold? And why care?

“Longtermism” is the view that improving the long term future is a key moral priority of our time. This can bolster arguments for working on reducing some of the extinction risks that we covered in the last section.

We’ll also explore some views on what our future could look like, and why it might be pretty different from the present. And we’ll introduce forecasting: a set of methods for improving and learning from our attempts to predict the future.

1. Introduction

What could the fu­ture hold? And why care?

2. The case for and against longtermism

What We Owe the Fu­ture, Chap­ter 1

Why I find longter­mism hard, and what keeps me motivated

Why I am prob­a­bly not a longtermist

3. Hinge of history

This Can’t Go On

4. To what extent can we predict the future? How?

Su­perfore­cast­ing in a nutshell

5. What might the future look like?

Top open Me­tac­u­lus forecasts

Longter­mism and an­i­mal advocacy

7. Exercise (45 mins.)

[Question] Ex­er­cise for ‘What could the fu­ture hold? And why care?’

8. More to explore

More to ex­plore on ‘What could the fu­ture hold? And why care?’