The Future of Telling the Future

Good news!

Your support of this newsletter helps provide treats for Juniper.

I am excited to announce that I have received an additional grant to develop Telling the Future for another six months. With your help I can develop it into something worth supporting.

The philosopher Derek Parfit called this moment “the hinge of history.”¹ We now have the collective capacity to transform or destroy both the Earth and ourselves. Our power continues to grow as our science advances. Rapid progress in artificial intelligence over the coming decades is likely to remake human society both for better and for worse. Over the next century, we could effectively eliminate poverty, learn to produce enough clean energy to power our society, and significantly extend the time that we can live healthy lives. But we could also degrade the planet’s environment to the point that it’s difficult for us to survive, kill unprecedented numbers of people with weapons of mass destruction, and use our technology to control and oppress the world’s population. Every generation thinks it’s living at a crucial moment, but the next few centuries may be actually a decisive time. The choices we make today could determine whether humanity will in the long run flourish or decline.

This is also—less momentously—a pivotal time for Telling the Future. I’m not likely to solve humanity’s most challenging problems, but I write about forecasting because I believe we need more foresight to navigate the rapid and extraordinary change that lies ahead of us. My aim is not just to forecast a few isolated events—although I am proud of the accuracy of the forecasts I’ve made in this newsletter—but to help readers to understand what’s happening now and think clearly about the future. Your response has been gratifying. One reader told me this is their favorite newsletter by a forecaster. Another says it makes them a “smarter human being.” Superforecasting author and fellow Substacker Dan Gardner tells PastPresentFuture readers “if you want to become a better forecaster, start here.”

Telling the Future has been made possible by a generous EA Funds grant I received to develop a newsletter on forecasting. The ultimate goal has always been to build a large enough subscriber base to sustain my work through donations once the grant money is gone. While the number of Telling the Future subscribers has grown steadily—there are more than 700 of you now—I will need to attract a lot more readers to make this newsletter viable in the long term. As regular readers know, I had a stroke a few months after I started writing that left me initially unable to walk and put me in the hospital for three weeks. It also meant that I was unable for a while to forecast or write regularly, and dramatically slowed my newsletter’s growth. But I’m happy to announce that EA Funds has agreed to provide me another six months of funding, which buys me more time to build my readership before I need to solicit donations.

So let’s make this happen. I want to make Telling the Future an essential read you look forward to seeing in your inbox. I plan to start to post more regularly again and on a wider range of topics. I also plan to write more about the issues that will determine what our long-term future will look like, so that together we can make sense of this extraordinary time. Of course, if there’s something you would particularly like me to write about, please let me know. Sometime in the fall, once I’m back on a regular schedule, I’ll ask for your support to continue this work. Some of you have already pledged to support Telling the Future, which I really appreciate. I understand not everyone will be able to afford a subscription—and that there’s simply too much great writing to support it all—but I hope that those of you who do find what I do valuable will choose to contribute to Telling the Future.

In a new Good Judgment interview, superforecaster JuliAnn Blam advises forecasters to “go down every rabbit hole and see what’s in there.” If you write a Substack newsletter that might interest my readers, please let us know about it in the comments below so we can connect with you. If you’ve been enjoying Telling the Future, the best way you can support it right now is to help me promote it by sharing it with others. Thank you!

1. Derek Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 2011): 616.