Macrostrategy is the study of how present-day actions may influence the long-term future of humanity.[1]
Macrostrategy as a field of research was pioneered by Nick Bostrom, and it was a core focus area of the Future of Humanity Institute.[2] Some authors distinguish between “foundational” and “applied” global priorities research.[3] On this distinction, macrostrategy may be regarded as closely related to the former. It is concerned with the assessment of general hypotheses such as the hinge of history hypothesis, the vulnerable world hypothesis and the technological completion conjecture; the development of conceptual tools such as the concepts of existential risk, of a crucial consideration and of differential progress; and the analysis of the impacts and capabilities of future technologies such as artificial general intelligence, whole brain emulation and atomically precise manufacturing, but considered at a higher level of abstraction than is generally the case in cause prioritization research.
Further reading
Bostrom, Nick (2016) Macrostrategy, Bank of England, April 11.
Related entries
crucial consideration | existential risk | global priorities research | longtermism | long-range forecasting | long-term future | trajectory change
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Bostrom, Nick (2021) Home page, Nick Bostrom’s Website.
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Future of Humanity Institute (2021) Research areas, Future of Humanity Institute.
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Duda, Roman (2016) Global priorities research, 80,000 Hours, April (updated July 2018).
Nice further additions.
I think that GPI sometimes distinguish between research on the relative effectiveness of different causes and what they in their agenda call “general issues in global prioritisation”. Potentially this latter category is somewhat related to macrostrategy (though GPI’s research tends to be more purely conceptual than FHI’s).
Yeah.
Also relevant is this talk by Rossa O’Keeffe O’Donovan where he compares global priorities research and cause prioritization research. Macrostrategy seems similar to the part of global priorities research that isn’t also cause prioritization research.
How does macrostrategy relate to global priorities research? I seem to recall that they were used interchangeably somewhere, but can’t find it now. [Edit: I may have recalled this job ad.]
Potentially it would be worth commenting on the connection between these two terms, depending on what one has to say.
Global priorities research doesn’t draw a conceptual connection to the long-term future, as macrostrategy does (at least as Bostrom defines the term), though of course a close link between the two follows given additional assumptions.
Very little has been published on macrostrategy as such. I thought it was worth creating an article mostly to provide brief background on how the term is used. I added a link to ‘global priorities research’ under ‘related entries’ and a reciprocal link in that article. If you come across a substantive discussion of macrostrategy other than in the two references I provide, I’d be happy to expand the article.
Makes sense, thanks. I guess one view is that macrostrategy just is global priorities research specifically focused on the longterm future.
Here’s a talk by Bostrom focused on macrostrategy, which had escaped my attention. I’ll watch it shortly and update the entry, if appropriate.