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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing What We Owe The Future, published by William MacAskill on March 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary My new book on longtermism, What We Owe The Future, will come out this summer You can now pre-order a copy (US link, UK link) If you want to help with the book launch, I think pre-ordering is probably the highest-impact thing you can do right now Longer Summary I’ve written a book!! It’s called What We Owe The Future. It makes the case for longtermism — the view that positively affecting the long-run future is a key moral priority of our time — and explores what follows from that view. As well as the familiar topics of AI and extinction risk, it also discusses value lock-in, civilisational collapse and recovery, technological stagnation, population ethics, and the expected value of the future. I see it as a sequel to Doing Good Better, and a complement to The Precipice. I think I’ve probably worked harder on this project than on any other in my life, and I’m excited that the launch date is finally now in sight: Aug 16th in the US and Sep 1st in the UK. I’m looking forward to being able to share it and discuss it with you all! I’m now focused on trying to make the book launch go well. I’d really like to use the launch as a springboard for wider promotion of longtermism, trying to get journalists and other influencers talking about the idea. In order to achieve that, a huge win would be to hit The New York Times Bestseller list. And in order to achieve that, getting as many pre-orders as possible is crucial. In particular, there’s a risk that the book is perceived by booksellers (like Amazon and Barnes and Noble) as being “just another philosophy book”, which means they buy very few copies to sell to consumers. This means that the booksellers don’t put any effort into promoting the book, and they can even literally run out of copies (as happened with Superintelligence after the Elon tweet). Preorders are the clearest way for us to demonstrate that WWOTF (or, as I prefer, “WTF?”) is in a different reference class. For these reasons, I think that pre-ordering WWOTF is probably the highest value thing you can do to help with the book launch right now. The US link to pre-order is here, the UK link is here, and for all other countries you can use your country’s Amazon link. US version UK version About the book My hope for WWOTF is that it will be like an Animal Liberation for future generations: impacting broadly how society thinks about the interests of future people, and inspiring people to take action to safeguard the long term. If the launch goes well, then significantly more people — including people who are deciding which careers to pursue, philanthropists, and political decision-makers and policy-makers — will be exposed to the core ideas. The book is aimed to be both readable for a general audience and informative for EA researchers or interested academics. (Though I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded at this!) So there’s a wide breadth of content: everything from stories of historical instances of long-run impact to discussion of impossibility theorems in population ethics. And, following Toby Ord’s lead, there is an ungodly number of endnotes. The table of contents can give you the gist: Introduction Part I. The Long View Chapter 1: The Case for Longtermism Chapter 2: You Can Shape the Course of History Part II. Trajectory Changes Chapter 3: Moral Change Chapter 4: Value Lock-In Part III. Safeguarding Civilization Chapter 5: Extinction Chapter 6: Collapse Chapter 7: Stagnation Part IV. Assessing the End of the World Chapter 8: Is It Good to Make Happy People? Chapter 9: Will the Future Be Good or Bad? Part V. Taking Action Chapter 10: What to Do In the course of writing the book, I’ve also changed my mind on a number of issues. I hope to share my ...