Robin:

Hi Agnes!

Agnes:

Hi Robin! So, I wanted to ask you about a puzzle. Something that bothers me, bothers a lot of philosophers—maybe will bother you less than us—but I’m going to frame it the way that the philosopher Samuel Scheffler did in his book Death and the Afterlife, in terms of an infertility scenario. And if you’ve seen the movie Children of Men…

Robin:

I have.

Agnes:

…or if you’ve read the book—okay, that’s basically the scenario in that movie, which is that, like, at some point, you know, there are just not going to be any more people. We learn that there are not going to be any more people. No one’s going to become pregnant again. And, you know, I think if we learned that we were in that scenario—if we learned that, like, whoever the children were that were most recently born would be the final children—

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

We would be— I, imaginatively projecting myself into that scenario, become filled with panic and dread. It seems horrifying to me.

Robin:

I agree.

Agnes:

And more horrifying than, say, like, imagining my own death. Even imagining the death of everyone I know. Right? I mean, in the long term, right? And, in fact, like, what the conceit of the movie—and Scheffler sort of goes along with this—is that, if we knew we were the last generation, then that would sap our energy for most of the things that we do. So we just no longer feel…

Robin:

Lie around on the couch, staring at the wall—what’s the point?

Agnes:

Yeah, and not just that, but also, what’s the point in behaving cooperatively to others? So you get wars, you get, just, people treating each other horribly. Right? So what’s the point of ethics even, right? That’s the conceit of the movie, whether you agree with it or not, right? So the idea would be, like, some have— Scheffler’s thought is, like, “A lot in our lives now is riding on the thought that we’re not the last generation.” Right? And were we to believe that we were the last generation, our lives would collapse, and all the things that we take to be meaningful, or at any rate, most of them, would just no longer strike us as meaningful.
Okay. So this is sort of his thesis. And, essentially, his point is just: Future generations really matter to us. But for me, there’s something very disturbing about this, because it suggests that humanity is a pyramid scheme. Because there would— We know for sure that we’re not going to last forever, right? And however long we last, it won’t be forever, because forever is a really long time. And so there’ll be some last generation, right? And their lives will have no meaning. Right? And then the generation before them, right, if they— Like, if we knew that the next one was the last one, then what we’re doing is promoting the lives of people whose lives have no meaning, right? And it trickles—run it backwards. And so, do our lives actually have any meaning? And is it legitimate for us to depend in this way, on future generations?

Robin:

Well, certainly, a lot of pieces of fiction like this make some presumption about, sort of, the linchpin of meaning for us. And then they present a scenario where that linchpin is gone, and everything falls apart. And a lot of disaster movies of various sorts are like that. And they kind of lie in the sense that, you know, in real disasters, people are much more cooperative and helpful and “continue on”-seeming, you know, than disaster movies seem to present. So, I would bet in the actual Children of Men scenario, we won’t get all these wars and terrible things. It would be sad, and I think people then would be sadder. I don’t think they would be so sad that they would just lie around on the couch and do nothing, or go out and slash each other’s throats just for the hell of it. I just don’t believe that.
But nevertheless, I do think there is a point to valuing future generations. And I do— I appreciate your reaction that it sounds horrifying, because I’m often horrified by people who have the opposite reaction. People who say, “Well, there’s no point in humanity lasting much longer,” because, you know, global warming, or inequality, or something like that. That just seems like a crazy overreaction to decide to give up on the future because of that.
So in game theory, you may know there’s a standard analysis of repeated games. And one— The standard analysis says that if you have a finite number of repetitions of the game, and we all know what the last game is, then on the last game, the prediction is we don’t cooperate because there’s no threat of the future. And then the game before that we don’t cooperate because we don’t expect to cooperate in the last game, and so on.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

So this is the standard iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma problem: That there would be never any cooperation, because there’s never a threat in the future, because you know exactly when the last period’s going to happen. If we just change the game to give a random last period, where the the period before the last period you don’t know that, that it’s the last period, well, everything changes. Now, as long as, you know, the chance per period is low, now people do cooperate, and they do each expect to have a future, and then one of them is surprised to be wrong. So, that seems to me a reasonable attitude we can have with this. To say that, yes, there will eventually be one that’s the last, but we— it won’t know that it’s that. Or— And the ones before it won’t know either, the five ones before, or something.
And so then they don’t have this problem of having no expectation of the future. But you could just say, you know, Why put so much meaning about future generations? Why should that matter so much? And, in some sense, that’s just part of being part of communities, right? So you might say, Why would someone lost on a desert island sort of feel despondent. They’ll never get to meet anybody else, right? Because, you know, they can think thoughts, and they can draw some art, they can make a meal… You know, why be so despondent that you’ll never meet another human in your life? Well, because we’re very social creatures, right? We care about being around each other. And so you could think of that similarly across generations. We would be much lonelier as a generation to think that we weren’t going to be part of this continuity of future generations. And it’s important to us to be part of this longer history.

Agnes:

So, just with respect to the people behaving well in disasters, I mean, it might be they behave well in some disasters, but not other disasters, right?

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

So, like, if you think about friends, close friends, you put them in some situations, like where they’re threatened from the outside—they might band together and like, become even closer friends?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

You put them in other situations, and they might turn at each other’s throats. The kind of disaster we’re talking about isn’t one where anyone’s going to immediately starve, or— in any disease, or whatever. It’s just a piece of knowledge. Right? And that knowledge is, there are no more future generations. And I guess my thought is that I feel inclined to make some inferences from the kind of panic that that fills me with, to like: What would it do? What would it be like if a whole society of people were filled with that kind of panic?
And I think the answer is not that we would get a bunch of prosocial responses out of people. It wouldn’t be like the disaster of a giant wave, or a giant army, or whatever. Like, I’m inclined to think that, like, James—PD James—is right that it would be one of those kinds of disasters that makes people less social rather than more.

Robin:

I’m not sure that that much is riding at stake on our predictions about how people react to this disaster. I mean, the interesting question here is, how much do we value the future generations? And how much should we value future generations? And, in some sense, what form should that value take? So I have a survey question I did a long— many years ago, that I thought was especially interesting. I’m not even sure if I did it as a survey, but I did it as a blog post, I think independently.
So the idea is, imagine, you know, a civilization that is, you know, a billion people, times ten generations. And now, imagine another civilization that’s a million people, like, times 10,000 generations. So you could— Two different civilizations, one is spread across space, and the other is spread across time. And the question is, which civilization do you respect the most? Which world would you rather live in?
And it seemed clear that people really preferred the long-lived civilization. That was a much more noble, impressive, grand scenario, the million people living across 10,000 generations. Which is interesting, because of course, in some sense, it’s spreading— preventing contact, right? When there’s more people, there’s more of them you could go meet! There’s more people you could go interact with.
And so, by spreading them across time, you’re preventing many of them from ever being able to find or meet each other. So you might think, you know, that’s bad! I mean, it might be like spreading this billion people across a long line. They can only travel a small distance on the line, right? They couldn’t meet as many. But still, people— It shows that people really, sort of, put this value on this across-time connection.

Agnes:

Right. So let me, like, give you my worrisome hypothesis about why people have that preference. And it’s also why I don’t feel very reassured by the thought that the random occurrence of the final extinction event, or whatever, really solves this problem. So, I think that people are imagining themselves into these worlds, right? And when you have the world that lasts a long time, they imagine themselves into it. They’re like, “I’m very far from the end,” right? Whereas the other one, they could be close to the end, right? And now, why would it matter to you so much to be close to the end, as opposed to far from the end, like, where you’re located?
And I think, well, maybe here’s the thing: Humanity really is a pyramid scheme, in that we’re all in some sense predicating the value of our own lives, and what we’re doing, on something that actually can’t underwrite that value. So we’re sort of writing these empty checks. But if we’re far enough away from that event, we can deceive ourselves about that, and not make it apparent that that’s what we’re doing. And that’s why they prefer the longer civilization.

Robin:

So let’s go with the other spatial analogy here. So, you know, a world of a billion people: In that world, we often find people saying, “My life wouldn’t be meaningful unless I could help everybody else.” So it’s a similar sort of pyramid scheme, right? You say, if you just selfishly live your life, that’s not a meaningful life. You need to live your life helping others. And of course, if they have to live their life helping others, then we’ve got a similar pyramid-scheme logic: Who’s the ultimate person who’s helped by all of us helping each other?
And, you know, you might say, “Well, if we each put 90% weight on helping each other and 10% weight on ourselves, then at least, you know, maybe it sort of all adds up!” We each put a lot of effort into helping lots of other people, but— And they put a lot into helping us, then maybe we all end up with a lot of nice feelings, and experiences, and support. But, you know, you wouldn’t need that 10%, right, if the only meaning from our life was to help others, and we all only help each other, then we might, like— There might be nothing at the end of that, right? So isn’t that pretty similar?

Agnes:

Very similar. I think altruism is a pyramid scheme. And it’s just a big mistake to think that the altruistic life is, like, a good or even coherent life. It’s an interesting fact that if you look at, like, a philosopher like Aristotle, who early on in his Ethics, he considers a variety of lives. And he’s like, is this life a good life? Is this— He’s like, which is the best life? You know, so he considers a life devoted to bodily pleasure, he considers a life devoted to honor, he considers a life devoted to making money. The life devoted to virtue.
He dismisses all of those as not being the best life. He doesn’t even consider the life devoted to helping others. It doesn’t even show up for him. And I think the reason is, like, it’s obviously a pyramid scheme, right? That is, it’s obvious that, in some sense, the meaning of your life, right, would then be— in a sense, you’ve shifted the bump in the rug onto other people, and then if they’re also altruists… Right?
And I think maybe the most basic, like, I don’t know, premise, or dogma of, like, of ancient ethics, which is sometimes called “eudaimonism,” right—but it’s shared by, you know, Plato and Aristotle—is that, like, the good of your life, whatever it is, is something that has to come home to you. Like, it can’t be located in another person’s— Your happiness can’t be located in another person’s life.

Robin:

So that’s pretty individualistic, we might say, and that word should frame the fact that there are other people who— other cultures who see themselves as less individualistic and criticize us for being too individualistic. And so, let’s imagine someone who joins or makes a family. And they say to themselves, Family is the most important thing to me. And it’s an example of a larger common phrase, to be something— Part of something larger than yourself. And people say they get meaning and satisfaction out of being part of something larger than themselves.
And an example of that is family. Probably the most ancient, most, you know, common example. So if you devote yourself to your family, you are part of the family. But the family isn’t you—family is this larger unit, and you can feel good helping them. So if you take the family on a nice vacation, and we all get along together, you got along together too. Take the family, has nice food, you’ve got nice food too. You, you know, had good experiences, you told jokes, the idea being we’re all getting along, that feels good to you and felt good to them. But it’s framed as, you know, building and helping the family.

Agnes:

So Aristotle’s ethics is actually much less individualistic than our contemporary ethics. He says man is a political animal, and he thinks that happiness is only conceivable in the context of a community. So, when I meant to say, like, Aristotle would not even consider the altruistic life, I meant specifically a kind of altruism where you’re benefiting people at a distance from you. They don’t— It doesn’t need to be a physical distance.
But the point is where their happiness is really distinct from your happiness. And that’s different from a case where, in effect, you’re embedded in a community such that your pursuit of happiness is coordinated with theirs. So that there’s a shared pursuit, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

But then you’re not benefiting them sort of independently of benefiting yourself. You’re also benefiting yourself, right?

Robin:

Of course.

Agnes:

But so, the, you know— You only get the pyramid scheme going if the benefit to others is in some sense independent of benefiting to yourself. Which, like, plausibly, in the case of, say, giving to charity, or whatever, even if there’s some small benefit you get, the idea is supposed to be that the larger benefit goes to the person receiving the charity, or the person that… So the point is, like, with respect now to the— Taking that now to the diachronic version, it’s like, if the throw weight, right, of the benefiting is in the future, you know, that’s one picture. Versus if, in some sense, you have a shared pursuit of the good with these future people, it’s more like your family; that would be a different case.

Robin:

Right. So if you’re imagining the good appearing at small spatial-time scales, and somebody somewhere gets the benefit, that’s different than imagining the benefit is to the unit. That is, you know, you— I can be proud of being part of humanity, and trying to advance the progress of humanity, and to be part of this great story of humanity. In which case, I can want there to be future generations, and that to be part of the sort of reason why I exist. And what I’m doing is to help not just me and you, but help them and connect us to them.

Agnes:

It’s very different, though, to think this is awesome, there should be more of it. And to think this only has any value insofar as something comes later.

Robin:

But that’s just too extreme.

Agnes:

Well, the way I was setting up the infertility scenario, which is the— And maybe it is a caricature, but, like, let’s take on the caricature case, like— I say, it fills me with existential dread and panic, such that I could see someone being faced with that thinking, “None of what I am doing has any meaning.”

Robin:

But that’s an exaggeration. But let’s take the at-one-time thing, right? Imagine, you know, you’re on a Mars colony, and you see the asteroid hit Earth, and now you realize 99% of humanity is gone, and it’s only you on Mars who are left. You could be sad. That would be completely reasonable to be sad. That was a huge loss, you’re still continuing, but 99% of humanity was lost. And similarly, if you thought we’re going to have a long future, and suddenly it’s not there, but 99% of humanity is lost—and that’s completely reasonable to be sad about that.

Agnes:

I guess, like, the picture that you get in these novels is not that people are sad. Like you might think if you’re sad, you actually want to cherish the, like, the little bit of time we have, or whatever.

Robin:

The last time we have. Absolutely.

Agnes:

Right? Versus, like— You know, you might think of it as, like, two very different pictures of parenting. Here’s another way, right? So, like, I sort of grew up, you know, in a kind of generation of people—my grandparents were Holocaust survivors, where there was really a mentality of, like, living for your children. And like, you know, every decision— Like, my parents came to this country, they framed that decision as for me and my sister.

Robin:

Laying on the guilt!

Agnes:

I don’t think it was intended to make me feel guilty.

Robin:

No, but it succeeds at that purpose.

Agnes:

I think that they would have felt guilty to frame it any other way. And there have been times when they have been shocked that I’ve made decisions, where I reasonably could expect that decision to be worse, overall, for my kids. And I’m like, “But my view is like, well, it’s good enough for them, and it’s a lot better for me!” Right?
But that mode of thinking was, like, not permissible to, like, my parents and their parents. Like, every decision you made had to be good for your kids because in some sense your life was for the sake of their life, right? And my thought is, like, well, it’s not a good way to live. Because like, do I— You know, if I live for the sake of my kids, do I want them to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their kids? And, like, does the benefit— Does anyone anywhere ever get the benefit, is the question—right?—of a pyramid scheme.

Robin:

Right. But again, I’m countering with this sort of becoming-part-of-something-larger-than-yourself, and imagine yourself part. So there’s an objective question of what would happen in Children of Men, and I guess I disagree with this person. I think it’s more like, 99% of humanity died, you’re sad, but perhaps you’re more committed to, you know, continuing with the 1% that remains. And yes, I would more predict that it was the last generation people would, like, take their lives a little more seriously. And they wouldn’t just go out and slash each other’s throats. They would be especially, like, high minded about— Like, this is important we get this last generation right.

Agnes:

So this is a really interesting case where you have kind of, like, the naive and noble view of humanity, and I have the cynical view. But let’s just suppose for a minute, right, suppose that there were a way to acquire data about this, right? Not an easy thing to do. But suppose there were a way. And suppose we acquired a bunch of data. And suppose it turned out that I was right, and James and Scheffler, and in fact this is how humanity would behave. Then, would you— What else would you adjust in your view here? Like, would you then become disturbed by the pyramid scheme?

Robin:

I might just say that they had a threshold of meaning. Like, they wanted to build this grand thing where humanity stretched across many generations. And there was some threshold of that being enough, and it isn’t enough yet. And now, it’s never going to be enough. And so the whole thing is lost.

Agnes:

I see. Okay, so your thought would be like, but you know— But given that the threshold was at least achievable, it wasn’t a kind of incoherent project, which is the thing I’m worried about with the pyramid scheme.

Robin:

So there’s a related set of issues here that sort of press at me more in the communities that I’ve been in, which is not just, “Do we value the future, and how much?” Or “How much do we sacrifice for them?” But like, “How is our value for them contingent on them sharing values with us?” The key question is, like, say you run a shop, it’s a grocery, and you wanted your children to run the grocery after you. They decide they don’t want to run your grocery. They want to go off and do software or something, right?

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Some people in history have been tempted to disown them, and say, you know, “This is the family. This grocery shop’s been in the family for ten generations. And that’s who we are. We tried to teach you as best we could that groceries are our thing. And you defied us and rejected our values.” And, okay, maybe you think that’s a little trivial. But you might grant that at some point, there’s some difference, some way in which they could go so far away from your values, that you might no longer want to embrace them. I mean, you know, I don’t want to lay out the specific scenario, but you could probably start to imagine just how far away it would be. What would it take for you to disown your children? Just what sort of heinous crimes would they have to do? And embrace them—not just, you know, do it temporarily and mistakenly, and then repent—but just embrace them and support them, and have them all the more, right?

Agnes:

Can I interrupt you with an anecdote?

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

When my son, my oldest son, was five, I was talking to him. I explained to him one of my views, which is that being— That acting is not a worthwhile way to spend your life, because you’re just pretending like you’re someone else. And it’s, like, maybe the one job that I have trouble respecting. And he said to me, “So if I became an actor, you wouldn’t love me anymore?” [Laughs] Or you’d be disappointed in me, or something, I can’t remember. Anyway, maybe acting…

Robin:

So you might think that, like, you know, what if they became Nazis, or something like that. Or racists, or something like that, and then you might less embrace them. You might even reject them, just, in some degrees. But I actually, you know, have a book called The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, and a larger sort of set of discussions about the future. And my middle prediction for the future is that our descendants get very different from us. And that happens relatively fast, and they can get really, really different.
And so this becomes a live question. So, my book— Many people look at that book, and they say, Those creatures and their lives as I depict them, that’s terrible. And they’ve already gone past the line. I do not embrace those as my descendants. I do not want that to be the, you know— If that’s what’s going to happen, I’d rather just everything ended.
And so, people are drawing these different lines. So it’s a very live, I think, real question: How far can they go? So you might think about it at levels of abstraction: You might think, “Well, as long as they like music, I don’t— They don’t have to like my kind of music.” Or, “As long as they get together and have meals, they don’t have to like my kind of food,” or something, right? And you might say, “Well, I just want the overall structure—where they, you know, they have a family, and they have a career, and they get together, and they listen to music, and they hear stories. And if the details of those are different, that’s okay, as long as it’s this larger structure.”
But what if the larger structure is different? You know, how far can they go? And so, I mean, the key thing that really drives this is realizing how different we are from our ancestors, which I think you are more aware of than most, being a scholar who studies very old people from a long time ago, right? We are really different from our ancestors. And if they saw us, and our attitudes toward religion, and our ancestors, and community, and war— You know, they would be horrified and disgusted by many of our changes. And we have to expect that that will happen for our descendants too.

Agnes:

You mean that our descendants will look back at us and say they would have been horrified with us?

Robin:

…And we would look at them and be horrified, by some of their changes.

Agnes:

So, but is the conclusion you draw from that, It’s quite reasonable for people to be horrified because the ancients would also have been horrified by us.

Robin:

Well, it forces you to ask, Were the ancients right to be horrified by us? So if we imagine a conversation between us and our ancients—ancient ancestors—I imagine them going first—you know, they hear about us—and then they go, “Eww!” And then we go, “Wait!” And we try to persuade them that we’re not so bad, and show us all the great things we are. I think, you know— and then they may or may not be convinced, but that’s somewhat of an open question.

Agnes:

Well, why wouldn’t you think that they would have engaged in this very same ratiocination, and said, “Hmm, people even way more ancient than us…”

Robin:

Well, yes!

Agnes:

Right? And thus…

Robin:

They just may not have done that, right? Of course. But they could.

Agnes:

Right. They could have, right? So, I mean, like, one thing you might think is, like, “Look, this is the tragic fate of humanity, is that most of us most of the time will be put off by these large differences.” It’s not clear it matters so much. Like, because…

Robin:

It has to do with, like, how invested are you in the future of humanity? I have an affiliation with the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. And so, that phrase, you know, evokes that, you know, we at that institute do many things, thinking about what could get in the way of the future of humanity, and then how we might do things to prevent that. And then we often find many people don’t seem to care very much.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And so, we’re trying to get people invested in thinking about the future of humanity. And the question is, Then how much do you value it? And it’s a key question about allowing change. So one of the approaches to solving this problem of the future becoming different is to stop allowing change. And many people I know in this community are actually quite serious about that. They call it value drift. And they think it’s a horrible evil, but must be stopped.
So even if we have accepted value drift across time in the past, they do not want to accept it. Now for the future, they want to find a way to lock in values to make sure they do not drift. Here’s an interesting thought experiment—I mean, certainly as a philosopher, you’re probably familiar with this sort of thing, because I got this— A philosophy teacher told me that they talk about the Star Trek transporter to their students. And so, you know, that you get into the transporter and it reads where your atoms are, and then it sends that information down to the planet, and then it makes a new arrangement of atoms in the same form, and it throws away the old atoms, and now you appear on the planet. And there you are.
And so the question is, in the philosophy class: You know, are these two creatures the same? And there’s two ways to ask the same question that get very different answers, which is relevant here. If you say “You’re about to get into the transporter. Will the thing that comes out, will that you?” It’s about 50/50. People aren’t so sure that the thing that comes out will be them. But if you say, “You just stepped out of the transporter. Was the thing that went in you?” It’s 100% yes.
So when you look back in time, you’re much more willing to embrace the path that led to you as being essentially you, than when you look forward in time, and see where you might go, and to embrace that.

Agnes:

Makes a lot of sense to me. Because the backward-looking perspective has a lot more knowledge. But I guess it’s— I don’t get why the moral of this story isn’t just, “This doesn’t matter very much,” in the sense that it’s just not clear to me— Like, the ancients also wanted to stop allowing change, and they wanted to lock in values, and everyone at any time has— Every time has wondered that there was, like, “Ah, the young generation, they’re screwing things up!”
And like parents do that with their kids. And it’s not clear to me that those moves… Like, it seems to me that the change that future people are capable of bringing about is not dependent on our present acceptance of it, and may even be— They even may make bigger changes based on our rejection. Which is, like, how children can rebel more against their restrictive parents.

Robin:

Well, if you thought it was simply impossible to constrain future values, then you just shrug and say there’s nothing that can be done. But in fact when people think about the future and technology, they imagine a pretty wide space of possible technologies, and they start to imagine that it would be possible. And it’s not entirely crazy. And so, I mean, what might be crazy, just how far you try to go in that direction. But, for example, you know, we may have machine-based minds as our descendants. And they could be direct brain emulations like I describe in my book, or they could be minds that we have constructed more directly. And these minds can have a range of similarities to our minds. They could be rather different or pretty similar.
And then it’s also possible, with machine minds, to put more controls in to limit how they can change. So our human minds just have their plasticity and their nature, which is pretty opaque to us, and so we can’t do much, right? You can’t just go into your kid’s mind and make sure he likes your kind of music. But that might be possible for future machine minds. Which then raises the issue, should you?

Agnes:

Yeah, so I think that there’s a question, like, How much open-ended scope for new forms of greatness and creativity are there that would be, like, the trade-off for value drift, right? So like the ancients couldn’t foresee that, like, you know, if we give up on some of their attachments to a certain kind of family structure, to a certain kind of size of community, right? Their communities had to be small. To wars as being a really important, just, part of culture—like everyone, every man has to have fought in a war… That sort of thing.
If we give those things up, which were deeply valuable to them, we get really big rewards for those. They couldn’t have foreseen the kinds of rewards, and they couldn’t have foreseen the, like, the sort of mental agility and creativity that would reap the rewards.
And so I think, I guess— I think the question of how sort of, like, accepting we should be of these changes would be a function of how much potential there is there, right? And it seems to me that if that potential is big enough, it’s going to elude our predictive abilities precisely in the ways that prevent us from controlling it. That’s exactly what has happened historically, right?

Robin:

But we don’t know if they would have approved of us. We know that from our point of view we have realized big gains. We’re not so sure that they would think of these as gains.

Agnes:

Absolutely. And I don’t want to presuppose that they would have. My point is, just, the kinds of moves that we’ve made were not foreseen.

Robin:

Oh, sure.

Agnes:

And so we should predict that the kinds of moves our descendants make—even if our descendants, our AI descendants, or emulations or whatever, they’re going to operate in ways where we— There’s just, like, a bunch of possibilities we haven’t considered, right? And so, like, if I imagine— Suppose the ancients, you know, suppose Aristotle tried to make a description of, you know, what would 2020 look like, right? And I just think like even though he was the most capacious mind I’ve ever, like, encountered, I just don’t think it would have been a good prediction.

Robin:

So this intersects with people’s concerns about capitalism in an interesting way. And with competition. So, a lot of people in our world, and for a while, have seen humans as substantially different from other animals. And that humans put a lot of time and energy into things that aren’t, you know, competitive. That don’t give us direct competitive advantages, like art and music and dance and fiction and romance, and the wide range of things, right? And so if you see humans as somehow having beaten the odds, and found a way to spend a bunch of time on all these useless, you know, unproductive activities from the point of view of competition, then you can be afraid that if competition continues, or even gets stronger, then it will take them away.
That is, if you’d say, “Well sure, you know, our descendants need to mate, but they don’t need to fall in love.” Sure, they need to talk, but they don’t need beautiful language. Or they need to give instructions, they don’t need to tell wonderful stories. And for many people, it’s somewhat of an axiom that a lot of the things that we value in our world come at the cost of competitiveness. And so a continued or increased competitive world will take away these things, sort of, just as a matter of, you know, biological-evolution logic.
And then they say, “Well, that— We predict, therefore, that our descendants will just be these workaholic machines, drones, who, like, again, don’t have music and stories and love and, you know, friendship, etc. Because these are all… waste. “

Agnes:

Yeah. I mean what’s interesting here is, in a way, your thought that we should be accepting of this—the workaholic-machine-descendant future is sort of in tension with your wanting to resist worries about the pyramid scheme. Because you might think, like, the way that we resist the pyramid scheme is that we invest in the present, right? And we have some present way of experiencing the value of our lives. And it’s just a given, like, it’s stories, and love… And, like, that’s how we’re doing it, right? And we could detach from that a bit, right? And then we could correspondingly get a greater attachment to the future, right? And to however humanity is going to value then, right?
So we can, maybe, have some element of choice in terms of— It’s like a parent, right? Choosing how much to invest in the joy of their own life versus their child, right? And so like in effect, like, the more that we sort of try to like get into the mindset of saying these workaholic, love— Unromantic, story-less, you know, human—er, AI, or whatever—the descendants, okay? These descendants, their lives are valuable—the more we are sort of stepping into worries about the pyramid scheme.

Robin:

Well, if that was the only, you know, axis of choice, that seems relevant. But I mean, people are imagining other options. For example, they might imagine, Let’s have a world government, or we make sure that we prevent competition.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Or strong regulations to prevent competition.

Agnes:

Well, but you don’t like that.

Robin:

I’m less enamored of that, yes.

Agnes:

Right, my point was just these two ideas of yours are in tension with one another: The we-don’t-have-to-worry-about-the-pyramid-scheme, because the people would just be sad now, if they— but they would still appreciate their lives, on the one hand; and the pro-change, we-don’t-need-to-put-the-brakes-on-change you.

Robin:

So, you know, one set of responses is to say that the things that humans have that they value are competitive. That is, they arose in the context of a competitive evolutionary process.

Agnes:

Those are not the same claim, though, right? That they are competitive, and that they arose in the context of the competitive…

Robin:

They’re related claims, though. First of all, you know, the “arose” claim is stronger. Easier to justify. Right? That all these human features that we treasure did arise through competition.

Agnes:

Mm-hm. A lot of bad stuff might also come through competition.

Robin:

Of course, right? So, war, for example, arose through competition as well, right? Or torture, and, you know, all sorts of mean things. But also the things we value most, they also arose through competition. So that doesn’t mean, you know, they all have to go away. But now if the competitive process changes, then some of those won’t be exactly optimal for the new competitive worlds. But there might be other, similar, related things that become optimal.
So, and that’s the hard thing: Like, stories may change, like, the kind of stories we told 100,000 years ago may not be the kind of stories we tell in the future. But does that mean they’ll never tell any stories, if stories have some overall functional use? So, one set of answers is just to try to show people how functional many of the things humans have. And so that was part of my story in Age of Em, was to say, Well, you know… And many of them remain functional.
And it’s also true that just many of them are deeply embedded in our nature. So the more deeply embedded these things are in our nature, the harder it will be for competition to take them out, unless, sort of, competition shall replace this wholesale. And so that becomes related to the issue of How much like us will descendants be?
So if we imagine the, you know, the choice between something like a brain emulation, which very— it rose very similar to a human and then put— to change that much from the human, at least over short timescales, and just a completely newly designed mind, you might think the newly designed mind could then make bigger changes with respect to things that aren’t— that are deeply embedded in our nature, because they need not be deeply embedded in theirs.

Agnes:

Let me ask you a slight tangent question (but it’s related). Suppose— So you also feel very, very sad at the thought of the infertility scenario, right? I don’t know, maybe you don’t feel the full force of like the panic and existential dread, but you feel you have a response to it, like a visceral response.

Robin:

It’s like seeing the Earth being destroyed while you’re in the tiny colony on Mars.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, so I think it’s not like that. It’s way worse than that, because the thought is, like—

Robin:

For sure it’s even worse in that book, right?

Agnes:

It’s the nothingness. It’s the prospect of the nothingness. So what if like you knew that yes, we would all be destroyed, but an alien civilization is going to come and— Now, first I might say inhabit Earth. I’m not sure it matters whether they inhabit Earth. They inhabit some places.

Robin:

Yeah. Some places, right. Absolutely.

Agnes:

And, like, how reassuring is that to you?

Robin:

It is actually reassuring to me. So, I mean, we may have time to talk about this at some other point, but I’ve done this recent work on what I call grabby aliens: Trying to predict where in the universe there are aliens. And I predict they, in fact, are out there, and we’ll meet them roughly in a billion years. And they’re sort of, you know, one-every-million-galaxies sort of frequency. And so, but you know, that’s very infrequent for where they started. But they spread out, and within a billion years or so they fill up the whole universe with stuff of them.
So that future is reassuring to me in the sense that if we die, there are creatures out there who find their lives valuable who would go on. We have— The whole future of life in the universe doesn’t rest on us, which is, you know, the Children of Men scenario, you could sort of think of it that way. Like the universe is entirely empty just for us. We are the only creatures— Sure, humans are the only, sort of, advanced creatures on Earth who have some sort of culture and, you know, romance, etc.
And Children of Men says, “And that’s gone,” and then the entire universe is empty after that. And that’s a really sad vision, right?

Agnes:

And so, in a way, like, for you… Yeah, there almost is no— Like, given the, like— I would say you probably think there’s a high probability that there’s at least one advanced civilization.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Right? And so, you know, even if humanity goes out, then there’s just this…

Robin:

5000 years ago, if we lived on an island, and a volcano comes on the island, we can see the lava is going down the hill and all of us who live on the island are going to die. If I remember that people from another island once visited I will go, “Well, at least somebody will go on.” Thankfully, it isn’t everything that will die. It’ll just be my culture and my family and my friends, which is terribly sad, but not so sad as to think everything dies.

Agnes:

And, do you have any allegiance to humanity over the aliens? Like, suppose there was some kind of trade-off situation where if we…

Robin:

Of course!

Agnes:

You do.

Robin:

I do, but I’m not sure how strong it is. And that’s, like, a really deep, interesting question. So— And this is related to your stuff about altruism. So I know a lot of people in this “effective altruism” movement, and they are really tied emotionally to this concept of altruism. And their concept of altruism is a pretty broad, unspecific target of altruism, like what you were thinking. And, you know, something I said in a talk at an event once was basically that, Look, so far in history, the main way anybody has ever influenced the future is by having descendants. Overwhelmingly, the most influence on the future has gone through that channel. And that means you should consider if you want to have an influence on the future, thinking about using that channel.
And the influence of having descendants is tied to the idea of, like, having an allegiance or an affiliation, right? So even think about nations in the world today, right? You might say, I want the world to do better. And then you could, like, be supporting the United Nations, or various multinational organizations. Or you could say, Well, I’m going to affiliate myself with my country. And my country, like, has a military institution, and I’ll help them, or it has a research arm, and I’m going to, like, make an alliance with other people in my country where we’re going to help our country help the future. And you might think, Well that’s not as altruistic. Right? You’re not trying to help everybody, you’re trying to help your thing.
But I say— But evolution, cultural and genetic, is this process by which things help themselves. And you know, that’s the main way all influence has happened. And I worry that if you create these communities’ organizations that create this habit of just trying to help everybody, those things don’t survive evolutionary pressures, cultural or genetic. They would go away, right? That is, the habit of just helping the world indiscriminately might just not have heritage, might not have descendants in a way that helping your country, your community, even your ethnicity, your family, your profession could.

Agnes:

Yeah, so as you were talking I was sort of thinking— I sort of had this flash of like, How would Aristotle see this idea of helping people who were not in your family? Right? And just kind of, sort of devoting your life and even sacrificing yourself and the goods of your life to helping them? I think he would call that slavery, because I think he— That’s what he thought a slave was, is somebody who the goal of their life is the happiness of another person. And I think what he would have said is, like, having slaves that are sort of the slaves of everyone is not a very effective way to have slavery. That is, a slave has to belong, like, to a particular community and to a particular person so that—

Robin:

Will they take care of them, instruct them? You know, develop them?

Agnes:

Who can specifically, who can give them instruction as to how to help them, right? And so what you might think is, like, the, you know, the effective altruists would like to be slaves of everybody. But that’s not a kind of coherent beneficence project. Because it’s actually hard to know what is good for someone else.

Robin:

There are several things wrong with it. But of course, you know, that’s one of them. But it doesn’t have to be deadly. It could be just a limitation of the cost as opposed to something that ends the project. Of course, you know, I would say that another problem of that community is just how do they coordinate to know if they’re actually being effective altruists? Because they usually sort of just trust, sort of, meeting each other and feeling like they think the other person has the right motives or something, which may not be—

Agnes:

Right, and a slave has much more intimate knowledge of whether they’re benefitting or not.

Robin:

Right, right.

Agnes:

Like they might be beaten, if they don’t do certain things.

Robin:

That’s right. But the thing— I mean, I tend to sort of come back to sort of long-term processes. And I do tend to think natural selection, or selection, will just be a continuing force for a long time. And the main alternative is governance. And so I actually think one of the main choices that we will have, and the future will have, is the choice between allowing competition and then replacing with governance. And both of them have downsides and risks.
I mean, obviously, competition has this risk that the things we value will be competed away. So I even have, you know, a colleague, Nick Bostrom, who has an essay about imagining that consciousness would be evolved away, right? We’re not sure where it comes from or why it’s there. So competition might decide that it could do without it, right? And then we just have all of these, you know, they say, “Disneyland without the children.”

Agnes:

Mm-hm.

Robin:

Because there’d be nobody there. Right? And so that’s in a sense a risk of competition. There’s also, like, I have this paper called “Burning the Cosmic Commons,” like, imagining all the waste that would be produced by an uncoordinated race to go out and colonize things. Because nobody owns stuff, and you just want to go out and grab it first, then a lot of stuff would be burned up. So there are substantial costs from not coordinating. But there are also substantial costs of governance.
So you know, in our world so far—and when governance is local—that if people do governance bad in one place, then they have a competitive disadvantage at the larger scale. And so competition disciplines governance. But if you’re trying to solve, you know, the basic problem of competition with governance, then you have to create a governance that isn’t disciplined by competition, in which case, what disciplines it? Like if we have a world government and it’s powerful, and it can preserve itself against, you know, civil war and rebellion and even, you know, people’s bad-mouthing it through censorship? Well, what ensures that that evolves well, or doesn’t degrade badly?

Agnes:

Aliens?

Robin:

Well then that would be a larger-scale competition! Right? But of course, again, that would just bother people all the more, right? They don’t want competition between the aliens because then that produces competition, which has all these costs, right?

Agnes:

But it— I mean it doesn’t maybe necessarily matter so much what they want, right? As like…

Robin:

Of course.

Agnes:

Like but it would suggest, for instance, the more we take the alien possibility seriously, the more we might want to move towards a world governance, right?

Robin:

Well it depends on how badly we think we will manage it. Right? So I mean, again, the governance has the two sides of the risks, right? If we have big, say, problems like global warming, and we don’t have world governance to solve them, then we end up realizing those problems, and that’s expensive, right? Or, say, war: We don’t have a world government to stop war, then we keep having wars. Which is expensive and damaging, right?
On the other hand, if we do choose a world government, and then it entrenches itself, and then it becomes this big bloated parasite that, say, limits free expression, limits innovation, limits growth—then, like, it could prevent the growth and innovation that would have allowed us to meet aliens on their terms.

Agnes:

Hm.

Robin:

And so it’s a really big choice we’re making, and you know in some sense the recommendation would be, drift a little in that direction but go slowly, and check and test. Don’t just jump all the way in into a world government and hope for the best.

Agnes:

I mean, it’s not— It doesn’t seem to me that we can easily implement a world government in any case. So there’s the— The jump doesn’t seem possible.

Robin:

I’d say we already have, halfway. So a lot of governance in many communities isn’t formal, it’s through an elite community which shares an elite opinion, and then sort of disciplines each other in the sense of deciding who’s elite. And so all communities in history have had that, even before we had any formal law or governance. And at the moment the various elite communities in the world are not competing with each other so much as having merged into a single world elite community, which then is not being disciplined by competition.
So you know, I was struck by, in the pandemic, at the very beginning of the pandemic, various health officials, like, had their recommendations of what to do, and then elites around the world talked about what they thought was going and what should be done, and they came to an opinion, and they declared it and then everybody fell in line. All the experts just said, “Yes, sir!” And basically, the entire world pretty much followed the same pandemic strategy, and things that I was interested in pursuing, like variolation or challenge trials, were simply not allowed anywhere.
And this is also true of a number of other areas of regulation, say telecommunications regulation, nuclear power regulation, a lot of different areas. Basically there are these elite communities are in the world, they talk to each other, and then sort of decide together what they think the right kind of regulation is. And then they all do it the same way. And there really isn’t much deviation anywhere.
So in that sense, we actually do have a world government, and we’re already sort of halfway there. The problem of, if this elite community like makes the wrong choice, there isn’t another elite community out there to compete with them. If you, say, as a potential elite, say, do something different to what everybody else said about the pandemic, then you will just be tossed out of the elites. And you won’t have a basis to do other things, you will just— And everybody knows that so they know they need to go along with what the elites decide.

Agnes:

So can I tell you what confuses me about this whole situation, is that it seems to me to be the product of competition. That is, so competition goes along with— People who like competition tend to like, like, a lot of, like, global-level exchange and open borders. And so then what happens is, you get like everyone trying to go to the same top schools, etc. Right? We’re all competing in the same place.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And there’s this weird way in which competition actually leads to coordination of a certain kind, and of a certain maybe noxious kind.

Robin:

Absolutely.

Agnes:

And so, like, your thought here that we have like these two options, namely competition and governance, where competition is like pro-innovation, and governance is pro-coordination, doesn’t seem right to me.

Robin:

I mean a certain kind of competition, like competition between societies. Right, so when we’re all in the same society, and we share some concept of status, then each of us through competition is forced to, sort of, pursue that kind of status.

Agnes:

Yeah, but how do we get the competition between societies? So is it that we close borders, we lock the internet…

Robin:

Well in the past, it was just the long travel distances and language barriers, etc.

Agnes:

Right, but now we need heavy government regulation to shield us from those other people, right?

Robin:

So obviously many, like, space-colonization fans have said, “Ah, we just need people to head off to another star” or something, and then we will return to this world of separation, and that in some sense would be true, but we’re a long way off from being able to implement that. And so yes, this is a—yeah, so— It’s sort of a common concept of, sort of, cultural evolution, or social evolution, that some kinds of evolution happen between separated groups. That is you know, so— Say, norms.
Social norms are a powerful influence on social behavior. And how would we know that we have good norms? And so the historical story was to say, well, there were all these different societies that just randomly had different norms. And then some of them, the norms promoted their, you know, innovation, survival, winning in war, etc. And so the norms we inherited until recently were the product of that sometimes fierce cultural evolution.
But it was a, you know— But these were different societies, relatively isolated, and each of which had the different norms. But now that we’re all together in one society, all sharing one set of norms, the norm evolution process is no longer going to be disciplined by that. And that’s an issue now. And I’m not offering a solution to that. I’m just pointing it out. I’m so— you say— I say, Well, government’s a problem. You say, Yeah, but we’re a long way from that. And I say, No, we actually are halfway there. In the sense that, you know, our norm-based, you know, elite-status-based coordination has been actually, been integrated at a world level.

Agnes:

Right. But what I was saying is, you said there were two distinct paths, and I see them as one path. That is, competition leads to coordination and entrenchment of the status quo. That is the result of competition, not innovation.

Robin:

Of course. Absolutely.

Agnes:

And so we don’t— It’s not like we have the world-government-coordination path versus the competition path. There aren’t two paths, is my point.

Robin:

We can choose how much to allow world government to go forward. So it’s a— I mean, if we ask just what is our levers of choice here?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

You know, if somebody proposes to give the United Nations stronger powers, or to create, you know, the larger units—we have a choice about whether to embrace those or resist those. So there is some degree of choice there. And we also have choices in each society to what degree to, like, try to become integrated with the world society, or to be somewhat different. Because those are the choices we have. And then, they have a limited degree of influence over the outcomes.

Agnes:

But you might think, for instance, if we don’t pull the levers for the world government there’s still—we still might be pulling the secret levers for the elite coordination that you’re describing, right?

Robin:

Yes!

Agnes:

And so it may be whether or not we pull that lever doesn’t matter so much, because we are being driven by these forces of…

Robin:

Absolutely.

Agnes:

I mean it seems to me the really— The important question is how could one construct competition that doesn’t tend to lead to this kind of noxious coordination?

Robin:

And in fact, you know, that’s the question of better forms of government. So one of the things we should do is in— As we drift toward stronger world governance, is to consider more strongly different alternative forms of governance, and which of them might be better by these criteria.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

As you may know, I have a proposal for a form of government, and maybe we’ll talk about that in a future episode. But exactly, that would be a criteria to bring to bear in evaluating proposed forms of government, is to say How well can they deal with this problem? That is, how well can they create an internal competition? I mean for example democracy: The claim is, you know, instead of military competition we have democratic competition. Instead of going to war and fighting each other, we fight over who gets more votes, right? And the claim is that that’s a substitute and we have less damaging fights. Right?

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So could we make— But that same sort of democratic competition could be more susceptible to this cultural elite, you know, merging, which all of the political parties that are—have any chance of winning, all have to pick from the same elite people who pick the same elite policies, right? And so the question is, could we— Are there alternatives that would more resist elite consensus in terms of the policies chosen, via competitive democratic government?

Agnes:

Right, so it seems like the question isn’t, “How much should we go for world government versus how much should we go for competition?” The question is, given that we are going for world government in one way or another—that is, informally, and you know, if not formally—what kind of world government should we aim for? Right?

Robin:

There’s choices on a lot of different margins. But even the world government is open. It’s still an open to question at the moment whether sort of the Chinese elites and leadership and their culture merges with the European and American elites and culture, or whether it diverges, at least for a while, and creates, you know, an actual, more distinct alternative. And so many people in the U.S., for example, who have disliked U.S. elite positions on, say, genetic engineering, have looked—or our nuclear regulations—and looked to China and said, Well, those in China seem to be willing to try that stuff. Maybe competition between China will allow more variation than has been true so far. And it’s still too early to tell, basically.

Agnes:

Interestingly though, like, if one really wanted, in some sense, there to be this true cultural evolution and cultural competition, one wouldn’t want to be too welcoming or friendly to the Chinese—like one would want to be so inclined to reject, right?

Robin:

Yes!

Agnes:

Because in so—

Robin:

But it’s similar to the counter— You know, the paradox of war, if you like, right? On the face of it, in immediate terms, war looks terrible, right? There are very few things in our world that look more terrible than war to us. Although the ancients, like, had a different view. But we have to admit that it seems to be one of the main engines of cultural evolution over the last 10,000 years.
One of the main ways in which societies who did things better won out over other ones was through war. And so, you know, losing war, and we’re losing that engine of cultural innovation. And it’s a paradox—we’re torn, right? Similarly for cultural integration at the world scale, right? The more that we have these separate cultures that are suspicious of each other and fight each other, there’s going to be direct cost for that, right?

Agnes:

So might it be the case that, like, there are a lot of substantial benefits, where if we look in advance it’s like the transporter thing— If we look in advance the benefits are just not going to be apparent to us, like with war or whatever, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

But in fact at the end, maybe they are they are beneficial, you know, in ways they’d eventually recognize. But that the project of trying to get people to see those things in advance would be pointless, like, because you’re asking them to understand something that’s…

Robin:

Right, but you just want to show enough historical examples to say, “But they’re probably there.” And so in my mind the most dramatic example is the transition from foraging to farming. So humans were foragers for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years. And then roughly 10,000 years ago there was this transition from foraging to farming, and the transition probably spread over 50,000 years and a lot of different ways. But it was a very wrenching, dramatic transition. And by most accounts, at an individual level, life is just worse after the transition.
So humans have these very strong egalitarian values and values for leisure, and so foragers were, you know, they lived in small groups, they had a lot of free time, they didn’t own much property, they were relatively promiscuous—didn’t even have like, you know, ownership of mates. And they were very sort of—enforced egalitarian rules in the sense of making sure nobody took charge, and there wasn’t an elite, and everybody got together and talked about all the key decisions.
And you know in many ways that fits our ideals of what human life would be like. And then because we had so much cultural plasticity, we became farmers. And farmers had war, and trade, and slavery, and marriage, and class inequality, and less—worse nutrition because they had a more limited range of things they ate. And they didn’t get to travel as much, they had to work more hours a day, and had more disease from density. And just, so, all the usual measures— Like, this transition from foraging to farming was, like, was worse! Everybody’s worse off, right?
And so if you could have imagined that transition but not be able to see farther in the future, you might have said, Let’s not let humans become farmers. Let’s stay foragers. And that could have made complete sense from the point of view of just looking at those two comparisons. And of course it would have taken a lot of foresight to be able to see what farming life would be like, but we’ve actually seen this happen in times where like— Even like, you know, when European colonists run around the world, often, you know, there was a conflict between the European lives and the local lives.
And interestingly, we often saw Europeans go native and move over to the local cultures, and we didn’t see very much of the other nearly as much, right? Not so many natives, you know, decided to join the European culture as went the other direction. So you know, in some very local sense, people didn’t make those choices. And many cultures have looked at, say, many foraging cultures looked at farming cultures and said, No, we don’t become those. But you know, larger evolutionary pressures.

Agnes:

So let me ask you a final question. So is your strategy something like this? You know, you ask the person, Is that going to be you when you step into the transporter? And they’re like, “No.” But then you’re like, you have them watch a lot of people go through, and you have them watch and see every time the person goes through, they say “No,” but then afterwards, they say, “Yes!”

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

And your hope is that you get enough of these cases, and then the person is gonna say, Yeah, that’s gonna be me. That’s your strategy?

Robin:

Yeah! Well, it’s one of the valuable applications of history. So you know that there’s this story we hear that, you know, people who don’t see the past have to repeat it or something.

Agnes:

But I mean, is that actually your prediction? Like, do you think that the person—

Robin:

Well, most of my prediction is just— But there’s a whole bunch of other things in play here, right? So I mean a lot depends on, like, just how much more different you expect future descendants to be than past people have been. So I know a lot of people who say they’re completely willing to embrace all the range of human culture we’ve ever seen in history, but they say, Well, machine minds, those are different. You know, those will be different in so much larger ways that I don’t want that to happen. I just want to stay within the range of human minds we’ve ever seen. And I don’t want to go to this larger space of machine minds. And that’s where they draw the line. So you know, and so for them, they’re doing that in the knowledge of all this human history. They’re saying, Sure, look at all these things that happen for humans, but they’ve all been humans, and we like them all.

Agnes:

It’s kind of like, Well yeah, I saw all the other people go to the transporter, but is it gonna be me? I just— it was just them. Right?

Robin:

Yeah, right, but it could be like, now you’re going to a metal planet or something. All the people who went through the transporters, they went to a garden, and now you’re going somewhere different, and going, Um, this one’s different.

Agnes:

Okay, we should stop there.

Robin:

Alright.