“Should we aim for flourishing over mere survival? The Better Futures series.” by William_MacAskill, Forethought

Today, Forethought and I are releasing an essay series called Better Futures, here.[1] It's been something like eight years in the making, so I’m pretty happy it's finally out! It asks: when looking to the future, should we focus on surviving, or on flourishing?

In practice at least, future-oriented altruists tend to focus on ensuring we survive (or are not permanently disempowered by some valueless AIs). But maybe we should focus on future flourishing, instead.

Why?

Well, even if we survive, we probably just get a future that's a small fraction as good as it could have been. We could, instead, try to help guide society to be on track to a truly wonderful future.

That is, I think there's more at stake when it comes to flourishing than when it comes to survival. So maybe that should be our main focus.

The whole essay series [...]

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First published:
August 4th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mzT2ZQGNce8AywAx3/should-we-aim-for-flourishing-over-mere-survival-the-better

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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