The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time

Product Information

Richard Fisher takes us from the boardrooms of Japan – home to some of the world’s oldest businesses – to an Australian laboratory where an experiment started a century ago is still going strong. He examines the psychological biases that discourage the long view, and talks to the growing number of people from the worlds of philosophy, technology, science and the arts who are exploring smart ways to overcome them. How can we learn to widen our perception of time and honour our obligations to the lives of those not yet born?

What these thinkers from myriad fields share is a simple idea: that the longevity of civilisation depends on us extending our frame of reference in time – considering the world and our descendants through a much longer lens. What if we could be altruistic enough to care about people we might never live to see? And if so, what will it take to break out of our short-termist ways?You can make philosophical and evidence-based arguments for protecting our species and future generations. But sadly, human beings are not rational. It’s not that easy.

A soaring hymn to all that might lie in the future; alongside the diverse and beautiful ways to think about it. Overflowing with wisdom and insight.’ Thomas Moynihan, author of X-Risk I understand the dangers of short-termism. I can both rationalise the argument, and feel the need to care more about future generations. But I confess I still struggle with how to translate that to action as an individual. Some days I wonder if I should be eating more ethically. The next I consider sacrificing a trip abroad to reduce my carbon emissions. The philosophical argument for investing in measures to protect the wellbeing of future generations can also be framed, simplistically, by imagining a set of scales, with everybody alive today on one side, and every unborn person on the other. Today’s population of 7.7 billion is a lot – but it is small when you weigh it against everybody on Earth who will ever call themselves human, along with all their achievements. If Homo sapiens (or the species we evolve into) endures for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, that becomes a humongous number of lives to consider. Trillions of families, relationships, births; countless moments of potential joy, love, friendship and tenderness.

It’s early days though, and while these examples are encouraging, they are also isolated. Unless we get better at ditching our short-termist ways on a global scale, the decisions we make in the early 21st Century could shape the future of our species in far more profound – and chilling – ways than we might realise.

Richard Fisher takes us from the boardrooms of Japan - home to some of the world's oldest businesses - to an Australian laboratory where an experiment started a century ago is still going strong. He examines the psychological biases that discourage the long view, and talks to the growing number of people from the worlds of philosophy, technology, science and the arts who are exploring smart ways to overcome them. How can we learn to widen our perception of time and honour our obligations to the lives of those not yet born? Further into the book, Fisher explores the mind's perspective of time. As humans, he explains, we are drawn to the present because we are psychologically distant from future events which seem less concrete and harder to picture. It is easy to understand then why politicians feel more ethically motivated to act on present day problems, such as rising unemployment, but less connected to long term challenges such as climate change. The suffering of those now is much more vivid and tangible than the suffering of those in the future. We have the innate ability, then, to imagine the consequences of our actions in deeper time, but sadly not always the will or the motivation to escape the salience of the present. Technological transformation trajectories, in which radical technological breakthroughs put human civilisation on a fundamentally different course. Moreover, a piece of art – whether it is a painting or a play – has the potential to endure longer than a policy paper or political initiative. It is often tended, reproduced and preserved as the ages pass, making it one of most enduring legacies a human being can leave for the world.But we also are almost certain to face serious existential risks along the way. Natural disasters have pruned life on Earth continually – this much we know. What worries the Trajectories researchers more is that in the 20th and early 21st Century we've added a whole host of additional human-made risks into the mix too – from nuclear armageddon to AI apocalypse to anthropogenic climate change.