Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, has recommended William McAskill’s What We Owe The Future, saying “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.”
The 35-year-old Scottish philosopher noted that his book makes the case for “longtermism” saying that positively affecting the long-term future is a key priority of the present day.
McAskill had tweeted earlier “The questions I address in this book are huge and deserve decades of research.”
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He continued his train of thought, saying “That’s the case for longtermism in a nutshell: future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better”, and added, “And crucially, the nature of these lives — whether they will be flourishing or miserable, egalitarian or oppressed, or whether or not they will exist at all— might well be determined by what happens this century.”
The ethicist’s research also ponders on civilizational collapse and technological stagnation, and how these might end up impacting the future of humanity.
Musk too has shown an interest in the future of humanity, time and again warning of a population collapse. His company Neuralink works on making human-machine interaction easier with its interface. Similarly, through SpaceX, Musk is trying to push the frontiers of space exploration and settle on habitable planets apart from the earth.
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When the innovator was embroiled in the affair scandal involving Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife Nicole Shanahan, Musk publicly rejected the media attention and vowed to keep working for the betterment of human civilization.
As the world’s richest man, Musk has focused on issues concerning humanity but has often polarized audiences with his views. In a recent interview, Musk’s father, Errol noted that Elon was right in feeling that he’s behind on his career. In the same radio talk show, Errol claimed he favoured Musk’s brother Kimbal over the 51-year-old.
