In this BBC quotation Richard Fischer asks the question: “Are we living at the ‘hinge of history’?”
This
item was published by the BBC on the 24th September 2020. I
think that you will find this item deeply thought provoking in these
troubled times.
Quote:
“Could
right now be the most influential time ever? Richard Fisher looks at
the case for and against – and why it matters.
What
is the best word to describe our present moment? You might be tempted
to reach for “unprecedented”, or perhaps “extraordinary”.
But
here’s another adjective for our times that you may not have heard
before: “hingey”.
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 of time ever. And it’s about far more than the
Covid-19 pandemic and politics of 2020. Leading philosophers and
researchers are debating whether the events that occur in our century
could shape the fate of our species over the next thousands if not
millions of years. The “hinge of history” hypothesis proposes
that we are, right now, at a turning point. Is this really plausible?
You
may also like:
The
idea that those alive today are uniquely influential can be traced
back several years to the philosopher Derek Parfit. “We live during
the hinge of history,” he wrote in his book On What Matters. “Given
the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two
centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have
even greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but
ourselves and our successors.”
The
hinge of history hypothesis has been gaining fresh attention in
recent months, however, as academics attempt to address the question
in a more systematic way. It began last year when the philosopher
Will MacAskill of Oxford University posted an in-depth analysis
of the hypothesis on
a popular forum dedicated to effective altruism, a movement that aims
to apply reason and evidence to do the most good. It sparked more
than 100 comments from other scholars approaching the question from
their own angle, not to mention in-depth
podcasts and
articles, so MacAskill published a more formal version, as a
book chapter in honour of Parfit.
As
Vox Future Perfect’s Kelsey Piper wrote
at the time,
the hinge of history debate is more than an abstract philosophical
discussion: the underlying goal is to identify what our societies
should prioritise to ensure the long-term future of our species.
To
understand why, let’s start by looking at the arguments that
support the present moment’s “hingeyness” (though MacAskill now
prefers the term “influentialness”, as it sounds less flippant).
First,
there’s the “time of perils” view. In recent years, support has
grown for the idea that we live at a time of unusually high risk of
self-annihilation and long-term damage to the planet. As the UK’s
Astronomer Royal Martin Rees puts it: “Our Earth has existed for 45
million centuries, but this century is special: it’s the first when
one species – ours – has the planet’s future in its hands.”
For the first time, we have the ability to irreversibly degrade the
biosphere, or misdirect technology to cause a catastrophic setback to
civilisation, says Rees, who co-founded the Centre for the Study of
Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
Those
destructive powers are outstripping our wisdom, according to Toby Ord
– one of MacAskill’s colleagues at Oxford – who makes the case
for reducing existential risk in his recent book The Precipice. The
title of Ord’s book is an allegory for where we stand: on a path on
the edge of a precipice, where one foot wrong could spell disaster.
From this vertiginous point, we can see the green and pleasant lands
of the destination ahead of us – a flourishing far future – but
first we must navigate a time of unusual danger. Ord put the odds of
extinction this century to be as high as one in six.
In
Ord’s view, what makes our time particularly hingey is that we have
created threats that our ancestors never had to face, such as nuclear
war or engineered killer pathogens. Meanwhile, we are doing so little
to prevent these civilisation-ending events. The UN Biological
Weapons Convention,
which is a global ban on developing bio-weapons like a
super-coronavirus, has a smaller budget than an average McDonald’s
restaurant. And collectively the world spends more on ice cream than
we do on preventing technologies that could end everything about our
way of life.
The
idea that we are at a treacherous turning point is also the theme of
a second argument supporting the hinge of history hypothesis.
According to a number of serious researchers, there is the chance
that the 21st Century will see the arrival of sophisticated
artificial general intelligence that could quickly
evolve into a superintelligence.
They argue that how we handle that transition could determine the
entire future of civilisation, through a kind of “lock-in”.
The
all-powerful superintelligence itself could determine humanity’s
fate for all time, based on whatever goals and needs it has, but
these researchers propose other potential scenarios too.
Civilisation’s future could also be shaped by whoever controls the
AI first, which might be a single force for good who directs it for
the benefit of everyone, or a malevolent government who chooses to
use that power to subjugate all dissent.
Not
everyone subscribes to AI’s long-term influence. But those who do
counter that even if you believe there is only a small chance of the
worst-case AI scenarios happening, the fact that they could be so
influential for such a very long time could make the coming decades
more important than any in human history. For that reason, many
researchers and effective altruists have decided to dedicate their
careers to
AI safety and ethics.
You
could also assemble other evidence to support the hinge of history
hypothesis. For example, Luke Kemp of the University of Cambridge
points out that human-caused climate change and environmental
degradation in this century could reach
far into the future.
“The most pivotal transformation so far in human history was the
advent of the Holocene, which allowed for the agricultural
revolution,” says Kemp. “Human societies appear to be intimately
adapted to a narrow
climatic envelope.
This is the century in which we will perform an unprecedented and
dangerous geological experiment and perhaps irreversibly push
ourselves well outside of the climate niche, or pull back from the
abyss.” (Though it should be noted that Kemp himself is sceptical
about the hypothesis and its expedience.)
You
might also argue that civilisation’s relative youth makes us
particularly influential. We’re only 10,000 years or so into human
history, and a case could be made that earlier generations have a
greater ability to lock changes, values and motivations that persist
for later generations. We might think of civilisation today as a
child who must carry both formative traits and scars for the rest of
their lives.
Though
as we’ll see, our relative youth could also be used to argue the
opposite. And this also raises an obvious question: surely, then, the
first humans lived at the most influential time? After all, a few
wrong steps in the Palaeocene, or at the dawn of the agricultural
revolution, and our civilisation would never have come into
existence.
Perhaps,
but MacAskill suggests that while many moments in human history
were pivotal,
they were not necessarily influential.
Hunter-gatherers, for example, lacked the necessary agency to sit at
the hinge, because they had no knowledge that they could shape the
far future, nor the resources to choose a different path if they did.
Influence, under MacAskill’s definition, involves an awareness and
ability to choose one of myriad paths.
Why
it matters
This
specific definition of influentialness leads on to why MacAskill and
others are interested in the question in the first place. As a
philosopher who thinks about the far future, MacAskill and others see
the hinge of history hypothesis as more than a theoretical question
to satisfy curiosity. Finding answers affects how much resources and
time they believe that civilisation should spend on near-term
versus longer-term problems.
To
give this a more personal framing, if you believed that the next day
of your life would be the most influential so far – taking a
crucial exam or marrying a life-partner, for instance – then you’d
put a lot of time and effort into it straight away. If, however, you
believed the most influential day of your life was decades away, or
you didn’t know what the day would be, you might focus on other
priorities first.
MacAskill
is one of the founders of effective altruism, and has focused his
career on finding ways to do the most good over the long-term. If an
effective altruist accepted that we are at the hingiest time now,
then it might suggest devoting a large proportion of their time and
money to reducing existential risk urgently, for example – and
indeed, many have.
If,
however, that altruist believed that the hingiest time was centuries
away, then they might pivot to other ways to do good over the
long-term, such as investing money to help their descendants. A
philanthropist, for example, who invested at a 5% rate of return
could see their resources grow by 17,000 times after 200 years,
according to MacAskill.
Some
might question this assumption about the benefits of long-term
investment, given that societal collapses throughout history have
wiped out funds. While others might suggest that money would be best
spent on big present-day problems like poverty. But the essential
point for effective altruists is that nailing down hingeyness could
at least help to inform how we might maximise well-being as a species
and ensure we flourish in the future.
Against
hinginess
So,
if those are some of the arguments for the hinge of history
hypothesis, and the reasons why it matters, what are the arguments
against?
The
simplest comes down to fairly straightforward odds. Probability-wise,
it’s just unlikely.
If
we were to navigate past this century and reach the average lifespan
of a mammalian species, then we’re talking about humanity
lasting at
least one million years,
in which we could potentially spread to the stars and settle other
planets. As I
wrote on BBC Future last year,
there are potentially a vast number of people ahead of us, yet to
born. Even if we look at only the next 50,000 years, the scale of
future generations could be enormous. If the birth rate over that
period stayed the same as it has been in the 21st Century, the unborn
would be potentially more than 62 times the number of humans that
have ever lived, around 6.75 trillion people.
Given
the astronomical number of people yet to exist, says MacAskill, it
would be surprising if our tiny fraction of that population happens
to be the most influential. These future people will likely
(hopefully) also be more morally and scientifically enlightened than
we are today, and therefore could potentially do even more to
influence the future in ways we can’t yet conceive of.
It’s
not only unlikely, MacAskill continues, it’s also possibly “fishy”.
Those who conclude we must live at the hinge of history might be
deploying hidden faulty reasoning; an unconscious stacking of the
deck. What if cognitive biases are at play, for example? Firstly,
there’s salience bias, which makes visible, present-day events seem
more important than they actually are. Living in the 1980s, for
example, you might have thought that nanotechnology was the greatest
risk to humanity, but the much-feared “gray goo” theory turned
out to be over-hyped.
Secondly,
there’s potential for confirmation bias: if you believe that
existential risks deserve more attention (as all the researchers in
this article do), then you might subconsciously marshal arguments
that support that conclusion.
“If
a chain of reasoning leads us to the conclusion that we’re living
at the most influential time ever, we should think it more likely
that our reasoning has gone wrong than that the conclusion really is
true,” writes MacAskill.
For
these reasons, among others, MacAskill concludes that we are probably
not living at the most influential time. There may be compelling
arguments for thinking we live in an unusually hingey moment compared
with other periods, he suggests, but because of the potentially long,
long future of civilisation that could lie ahead, the actual hinge of
history is most likely yet to come.
The
upside of no hinge
While
it might seem deflating to conclude that we are probably not the most
important people at the most important time, it could be a good
thing. If you believe the “time of perils” view, then the next
century will be especially dangerous to live through, potentially
requiring significant sacrifices to ensure our species persists. And
as Kemp points out, history suggests that when fears are high that a
future utopia is at stake, unpleasant things are sometimes justified
in the name of protecting it.
“States
have a long history of imposing draconian measures to respond to
perceived threats, and the greater the threat the more severe the
emergency powers,” he says. For example, some researchers who wish
to prevent the rise of malevolent AI or catastrophic technologies
have argued we may need ubiquitous
global surveillance of every living person,
at all times.
But
if life at the hinge requires sacrifices, that does not mean that
life at other times can be laissez-faire. It doesn’t absolve us of
all responsibility to the future. This century we could still do
remarkable damage, and it needn’t be as catastrophic as a
species-ending event. Over the past century, we have found myriad new
ways to leave malignant heirlooms for our descendants, from carbon in
the atmosphere to plastic in the ocean to nuclear waste beneath the
ground.
So, while we do not know if our time will be the most influential or not, we can say with more certainty that we have increasing power to shape the lives and well-being of billions of people living tomorrow – for better and for worse. It will be for future historians to judge how wisely we used that influence.”
