Are we living at a turning point in history?

Scientists and philosophers argue, and BBC Future journalist Richard Fisher tries to reason them out

What word best describes the time in which we live? You may be tempted to say “unprecedented” or perhaps “extraordinary.”

But here’s another adjective that you may not have heard of before: “looping.”

It may not be a particularly elegant term, but it describes a potentially profound idea: that we may be living through the most influential period in history. And it is about much more than the Covid-19 pandemic and the political events of 2020. Leading philosophers and researchers are debating whether events in the 21st century could affect the fate of our species over the next thousands, if not millions of years. The history loop hypothesis suggests that we are now at a turning point. Is that really true?

For the first time, the idea that today’s generation has a unique influence was expressed by the philosopher Derek Parfit several years ago. “We are in a history loop,” he wrote in his book On What Matters. “Given the scientific and technical discoveries of the past two centuries, the world has never changed so quickly. Soon we will have even more opportunities to transform not only our environment but also ourselves and our descendants. “

In recent months, the history loop hypothesis has attracted new attention as scholars have begun to systematize this issue. It all started last year when philosopher Will Macaskill of the University of Oxford posted a detailed analysis of the hypothesis on a popular forum on “effective altruism,” a movement that seeks to apply reason and evidence to good deeds. The post garnered over 100 comments from other scholars, not to mention new podcasts and articles.

As Kelsey Piper of Vox Future Perfect wrote at the time, the history loop debate is not just an abstract philosophical discussion: its main purpose is to define the priorities of a society that will allow our species to exist for a long time.

To understand why this is important, let’s start by looking at the arguments that support the “loop” of the present moment (although Macaskill now prefers the term “influence” as it sounds less frivolous).

First, there is a point of view that can be called “the time of threats.” In recent years, the idea has been increasingly heard that in our time there is an unusually high risk of self-destruction and long-term damage to the planet. “The Earth has existed for 45 million centuries, but this century is special: this is the first time that the future of the planet is in the hands of one species — ours,” notes British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. “For the first time, there is a possibility that we will irreversibly destroy the biosphere or use technology in such a way that it will lead to a catastrophic rollback of civilization.”

These destructive forces transcend our wisdom, says Toby Ord, one of Macaskill’s colleagues at Oxford. In his recent book, The Precipice, he calls for a reduction in existential risk. The title of the book emphasizes that we are on the brink of an abyss, and one wrong step can lead to disaster. From this dizzying vantage point, we can see the green and alluring lands of our destination — a flourishing distant future — but first, we must deal with the present moment, which carries with it an unfamiliar danger. Ord believes the odds of human extinction in this century are one in six.

One of the arguments why the present time is a turning point is that we have created threats that our ancestors never had to face: for example, the likelihood of nuclear war or artificial killer pathogens. And yet we are doing very little to prevent the eventual end of civilization. The UN Biological Weapons Convention, which represents a global ban on the development of biological weapons like the super-coronavirus, has a budget smaller than the average McDonald’s. In general, the world spends more on ice cream than on preventing technologies that could end our normal lives.

A number of serious researchers believe that a complex artificial intelligence may appear in the 21st century, which will quickly turn into a superintelligence. And how we handle this change will determine the future of civilization.

The almighty superintelligence will be able to determine the fate of humanity for all time, based on its own goals and needs, but, according to the researchers, other scenarios are also possible. The future of civilization can fall into the hands of someone who takes control of AI, and it can be either the force of good, using it for the good of all, or an aggressive government that decides to use this technology to suppress any dissent.

Not everyone agrees that AI will have such a long-term impact. But even if the likelihood of a worst-case scenario is low, the very possibility of such lasting influence makes the coming decades more important than any others in human history. Therefore, many researchers and effective altruists have chosen to devote their careers to the safety and ethics of AI.

There is other evidence to support the history loop hypothesis. For example, Luke Kemp of the University of Cambridge notes that anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation in this century could have consequences far into the future. “The most important transformation in human history so far has been the onset of the Holocene, which led to the agricultural revolution,” says Kemp. — Human societies are tuned in to a narrow climatic “window”. But in this century we are conducting an unprecedented and dangerous geological experiment that could irrevocably push us far beyond our climatic niche. “ (Although it should be noted that Kemp himself is sceptical about this hypothesis and its feasibility.)

Someone would argue that the relative youth of civilization makes our time especially influential. Human history is only 10,000 years old or so, and it can be argued that earlier generations are better able to maintain change, values ​​and motivation for posterity. Today’s civilization is like a child who is forced to bear both fateful features and scars for the rest of his life.

Although, as we will see, our relative youth can also be proof of the opposite. And here the obvious question arises: did the first people live in the most influential times? After all, a few wrong steps in the Paleocene or the dawn of the agricultural revolution, and our civilization would never have arisen.

Perhaps so, but McAskill suggests that many moments in human history were important, but not necessarily fateful. Hunter-gatherers, for example, lacked the necessary freedom of choice to form a “noose.” They simply did not know that they could influence the distant future, and they did not have the resources to choose another path, even if they knew which one. Influence, as defined by McAskill, involves awareness and the ability to choose one of the countless paths.

Why is it important

This particular definition of influence underscores why McAskill and others are interested in this question. Macaskill is a philosopher who thinks about the distant future, and he views the history loop hypothesis as more than a theoretical question to satisfy curiosity. Finding answers affects how much resources and time a civilization should spend on solving short-term and long-term problems.

Imagine if you thought that tomorrow would be the most important day in your life — for example, an exam or a wedding — then you would spend a lot of time and effort on it right now. However, if you thought there were decades left before the most important day in your life, or you didn’t know when that day would come, you would first focus on something else.

Macaskill is one of the founders of effective altruism and has spent his entire career looking for ways to maximize long-term benefits. If an effective altruist agrees that we are living in the most fateful moment, then he devotes most of his time and money to urgently reducing existential risk; many do so.

If, however, the altruist is convinced that the turning point is in the past, he switches to other ways of doing good in the long run — for example, investing in helping his descendants. So, according to Macaskill, if you invest funds with a return of 5%, in 200 years the invested resources will grow 17 thousand times.

Someone will question the benefits of long-term investment, given that social collapse has wiped out savings more than once in our history. Some might think that money is best spent on solving today’s serious problems, such as poverty. But for effective altruists, it is important that recognizing the loop will help us understand how to maximize the well-being and prosperity of our species in the future.

Arguments against the hypothesis

The simplest argument against the history loop hypothesis boils down to fairly simple calculations: it is unlikely.

If in this century we were destined to reach the middle of the path of humanity on the planet, then, in general, our existence should have been estimated at least a million years, during which we could potentially learn to fly to the stars and populate other planets. As I wrote on BBC Future last year, a huge number of people are yet to be born. Even if we only look at the next 50,000 years, the scale of future generations looks enormous. If the birth rate during this period remains the same as in the 21st century, the number of unborn people is potentially 62 times the number of people who have ever lived — about 6.75 trillion people.

Given the astronomical number of people who don’t yet exist, it would be surprising if our tiny fraction of that population were the most influential, McAskill says. These people of the future are likely (hopefully) to be more enlightened morally and scientifically than we are today. Therefore, they can affect the future in ways we cannot yet imagine.

McAskill also says the hypothesis sounds dubious. What if it relies on cognitive biases? First, the visible contemporary events seem to us more important than they really are. For example, living in the 1980s, you might have thought nanotechnology posed the greatest danger to humanity, but the daunting grey goo theory was overblown.

Second, there is the issue of confirmation bias: if you think existential risks deserve more attention (like all the researchers in this article), you can subconsciously formulate arguments to support this conclusion.

“If our line of reasoning leads us to the conclusion that we are living in the most influential time in history, then it is more likely that our reasoning has gone in the wrong direction than that the conclusion is indeed correct,” writes MacAskill.

For these reasons, among other things, McAskill concludes that we are probably not living in the most influential times. There may be compelling arguments that we are living in an unusually difficult time compared to other periods, but due to the potentially very long future of civilization, the real turning point is likely not yet come.

The positive side of not having a loop now

On the one hand, it may seem humiliating that we are probably not the most important people at the most important times, but on the other hand, it can be good. If you believe in the “time of threat” theory, then life in the next century will be especially dangerous and may require significant sacrifices to ensure the preservation of our species. History tells us that when people are very afraid that their future utopia is under threat, in the name of its protection, they are sometimes ready to justify very unpleasant things.

“We have a lot of experience with draconian responses to perceived threats, and the bigger the threat, the more serious the emergency response,” he says. For example, some researchers wishing to prevent the spread of hostile AI or catastrophic technologies advocate universal global surveillance of every person at all times.

But if life in the era of the loop requires sacrifice, this does not mean that we can completely relax at less significant times. This does not relieve us of our responsibility to the future. In this century, we can still do significant damage to the world. Over the past century, we have found countless new ways to leave dangerous heirlooms to posterity — from carbon in the atmosphere to plastic in the ocean and nuclear waste underground.

Therefore, while we do not know for sure whether our time will have the greatest impact or not, it can be said with great certainty that we have more and more opportunities to shape the lives and well-being of the billions of people who will live tomorrow — for better or for worse. And historians of the future will appreciate how wisely we used this influence.