Hey readers,
Another week, another roundup of the best (and sometimes the worst) in Future Perfect-y content on the web. Thanks again for reading — and if you haven't had a chance to check out the Future Perfect 50, please do!
—Kelsey Piper
The heavy price of longtermism (New Republic)
What's longer: the potential future of the human race or the ongoing conversation over Will MacAskill's What We Owe the Future? More than two months after the book's publication, the debate is still going strong, with a recent suite of pieces arguing that longtermism is not just flawed but actively dangerous. I can get on board with the former, but not the latter, and this article — like many of the other critiques — gets a number of the players and ideas around longtermism wrong.
Far from stealing resources from present-day causes — which still make up the bulk of effective altruism donations — longtermism really asks us to pay more attention and devote more money to existential threats like engineered pandemics or artificial general intelligence that threaten not just the future but the present. (And those causes are still criminally underfunded, as the failure to focus on pandemic prevention demonstrates.) Longtermism might be less than MacAskill promises in his book, but it's a whole lot more than many of its critics give it credit for. —Bryan Walsh
With promise of legalization, psychedelic companies joust over future profits (New York Times)
Almost every day, I get a PR email from a company raving about how it'll revolutionize mental health care by treating depression or PTSD with psychedelics. I'm excited about psychedelics' therapeutic potential, but I predict the implementation will be a shitshow. As this article notes, companies are filing patents to gain a monopoly over delivering psychedelics and may lower their costs by giving short shrift to the psychotherapy that's supposed to accompany the ingestion of the drugs. But safety and effectiveness hinge on having therapists to guide patients in integrating psychedelic experiences into their self-understanding. The corporatization of psychedelics threatens to undo their potential. —Sigal Samuel
The Cochise County groundwater wars (Grist)
The American West is facing its worst drought in centuries, much of which can be blamed on climate change. And one of the larger drivers of climate change is also making the drought worse: animal agriculture. The squeeze on water usage is especially acute in Cochise County, Arizona, a conservative and libertarian enclave in the southeastern part of the state, where some citizens' wells are going dry as water is pumped to feed thousands of dairy cows and the alfalfa they gobble up.
The water shortages have gotten so bad that it has scrambled the region's politics. Citizens organized to successfully put a measure on the ballot that, if passed, would restrict water use — the kind of regulatory action most on the right decry. The story is a cautionary tale about the need to shift to less resource-intensive foods (like plant-based milks), the limits of NIMBYism (water-intensive farms will just move elsewhere if they can't operate in Cochise County), and perhaps also a preview of the ways climate change could upend partisan politics. —Kenny Torrella
The pandemic uncovered ways to speed up science (Wired)
Science is often held up by well-intentioned but poorly executed bureaucratic processes. Covid-19 shook up the status quo, pushing scientists to become more collaborative and streamlined. Researcher Saloni Dattani — who was featured in our Future Perfect 50 list — broke down how science has accelerated in the last two years. Fast yet accurate science matters; it's the reason we have effective Covid vaccines that saved (and continue to save!) millions of lives. But we can't let progress become stagnant now that most processes are reverting to "normal." I hope we can internalize Dattani's analysis and continue creating worthwhile solutions that aren't hampered by poor data infrastructure or paywalls. —Izzie Ramirez
The vegan protesters spilling milk in supermarkets are right (New Republic)
Whatever you think about recent climate protests, they definitely got people talking about how climate change affects our lives. In this piece, Jan Dutkiewicz delves into the connection between agriculture and climate that activists spilling milk in supermarkets are getting at. While animal agriculture is rising quickly and contributes to climate change and loss of biodiversity — not to mention food waste and ethical problems — and most Americans are in theory against factory farming, people rarely consider the food system seriously as a way to combat climate change. This article presents an environmental, data-backed case for reducing the amount of meat we eat. —Siobhan McDonough
How much economic growth is necessary to reduce global poverty substantially? (Our World in Data)
My colleague Kelsey has written eloquently about how misguided the movement for "degrowth" — actively attempting to reduce economic output in an attempt to prevent environmental damage — is. But this piece from Max Roser, who was on our Future Perfect 50 list, makes the case from a slightly different angle. Roser tries to do the math and see how much more money people in the Global South would need to have for the entire world to be as rich as Denmark, a wealthy country that's also unusually good at reducing poverty within its borders.
"The minimum necessary growth to reduce global poverty to the level of poverty in Denmark is 410 percent," he concludes. This is almost certainly an underestimate; this scenario imagines that, as Roser puts it, "every country stops economic growth entirely once they reach the average income of Denmark," after which all growth goes to the Global South. In the real world, we'd need much, much more than a five-fold increase in the size of the global economy. This doesn't mean such gains are impossible. World GDP grew about five-fold between 1968 to 2020. We can do that again. But we have to keep growing; degrowth is simply not an option if you care about global poverty. —Dylan Matthews
Shutterstock will start selling AI-generated stock imagery with help from OpenAI (The Verge)
After months of worries that powerful AI image models will put artists (and art-selling platforms) out of business, Shutterstock is trying to get ahead of the change by partnering with OpenAI to integrate DALL-E, one of the early well-known image models, directly into their product.
According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the image dataset they licensed from Shutterstock was essential to training the DALL-E model, but in addition to concerns about illustration work as a livelihood, artists were frustrated that their contribution wasn't recognized or compensated. Shutterstock hopes to change this by providing a framework where artists can be paid royalties when their work is used to teach an AI. —Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg
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