BOOK REVIEW: How humanity ends (or keeps going)
The premise of William MacAskill’s book is simple: what we do now will have enormous consequences for multitudes
09 February 2023 - 05:00
It is a flaw in the workings of the human mind that we can look back thousands of years, sometimes with awe at the achievements of ancient ancestors, but we are unable to apply the same respect to those we know will come after us.
How many people are we talking about? In his book What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View, Oxford University philosophy professor William MacAskill gives two scenarios. If humankind stays only on Earth, and endures as long as the average mammalian species, there are still 80-trillion people to come in the next 700,000 years before our possible extinction...
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