How many lives does the future hold?
Toby Newberry (Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Technical Report No. T2-2021
The total number of people who have ever lived, across the entire human past, has been estimated at around 100 billion.2 The total number of people who will ever live, across the entire human future, is unknown - but not immune to the tools of rational inquiry. This report estimates the expected size of the future, as measured in units of ‘human-life-equivalents’ (henceforth: ‘lives’). The task is a daunting one, and the aim here is not to be the final word on this subject. Instead, this report aspires to two more modest aims...
Other working papers
Estimating long-term treatment effects without long-term outcome data – David Rhys Bernard (Paris School of Economics)
Estimating long-term impacts of actions is important in many areas but the key difficulty is that long-term outcomes are only observed with a long delay. One alternative approach is to measure the effect on an intermediate outcome or a statistical surrogate and then use this to estimate the long-term effect. …
Do not go gentle: why the Asymmetry does not support anti-natalism – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
According to the Asymmetry, adding lives that are not worth living to the population makes the outcome pro tanto worse, but adding lives that are well worth living to the population does not make the outcome pro tanto better. It has been argued that the Asymmetry entails the desirability of human extinction. However, this argument rests on a misunderstanding of the kind of neutrality attributed to the addition of lives worth living by the Asymmetry. A similar misunderstanding is shown to underlie Benatar’s case for anti-natalism.
In Defence of Moderation – Jacob Barrett (Vanderbilt University)
A decision theory is fanatical if it says that, for any sure thing of getting some finite amount of value, it would always be better to almost certainly get nothing while having some tiny probability (no matter how small) of getting sufficiently more finite value. Fanaticism is extremely counterintuitive; common sense requires a more moderate view. However, a recent slew of arguments purport to vindicate it, claiming that moderate alternatives to fanaticism are sometimes similarly counterintuitive, face a powerful continuum argument…