Hey readers,

In 2015, 20 residents of Yahaba, a small town in northeast Japan, went to their town hall to take part in a unique experiment.

Their goal was to design policies that would shape Yahaba’s future. They’d debate questions typically reserved for politicians: Would it be better to invest in infrastructure or child care? Should we promote renewable energy or industrial farming?

But there was a twist. While half the citizens were invited to be themselves and express their own opinions, the other half were asked to put on special ceremonial robes and pretend they were people from the future. Specifically, they were told to imagine they were from the year 2060 — so that when deliberating with the group, they’d be representing the interests of a future generation.

The results were striking. The citizens who were just being themselves advocated for policies that would boost their lifestyle in the short term. But the people in robes advocated for much more radical policies — from massive health care investments to climate change action — that would be better for the town in the long term.

And they managed to convince their fellow citizens that taking the long view would benefit their grandkids. In the end, the entire group reached a consensus that they should, in some ways, act against their own immediate self-interest in order to help the future.

This experiment marked the beginning of Japan’s Future Design movement, and it’s since been replicated in city halls around the country, feeding directly into real policymaking.

It’s one example of a burgeoning global attempt to answer big moral questions: Do we owe it to future generations to take their interests into account? What does it look like to incorporate the preferences of people who don’t even exist yet? How can we be good ancestors?

Long-term thinking is hard, but it’s picking up steam

Several Indigenous communities have long used the principle of “seventh-generation decision-making,” which involves weighing how choices made today will affect a person born seven generations from now.

In fact, it’s that principle that inspired the Japanese economics professor Tatsuyoshi Saijo to create the Future Design movement (he learned about it while visiting the US and thought it extraordinary).

But many of us probably haven’t given much thought to how we can become good ancestors. We might feel like that’s not our duty. As a quote attributed to Groucho Marx puts it: “Why should I care about future generations — what have they ever done for me?”

It’s also just genuinely hard to focus on the future when we’re struggling under the weight of our day-to-day problems, and when everything in society — from our political structures (think four-year election cycles) to our consumerist technologies (think Amazon’s Buy Now button) — seems to favor short-term solutions.

And yet, failing to think long term is a huge problem because threats like climate change, pandemics, and rapidly emerging technologies are making it clear that it’s not enough to adopt “sustainability” as a buzzword. If we really want human life to be sustainable, we need to break out of our fixation on the present. Training ourselves to take the long view is arguably the best thing we can do for humanity.

Roman Krznaric, a former political scientist and author of the new book The Good Ancestor, calls people who take the long view “time rebels.” Philosophers in the effective altruist community call them “longtermists.”

They’re not all part of a single cohesive movement; they focus on different risks, from climate change to artificial intelligence. But they’re united by a fierce insistence that we should be focusing much more on making sure future generations can flourish.

Some of them are turning to courts of law for support. “Legal struggles for the rights of future people are exploding around the world,” Krznaric told me.

This April, Germany’s constitutional court issued a historic ruling saying that the government’s current climate measures are not good enough to protect future generations and giving it until next year to improve its carbon emissions targets.

Pakistan’s supreme court also issued a ruling in April — this one against the expansion of the cement industry, which is terrible for the climate. The presiding judge wrote in the verdict: “This court should be mindful that its decisions also adjudicate upon the rights of the future generations of this country.”

Krznaric, who was surprised and delighted to find his book cited in the court proceedings, told me, “These lawyers and judges are trying to find a language to talk about something they know is right, and it’s about intergenerational justice. Law is generally slow, but stuff is happening fast.”

The push to embrace long-term thinking isn’t limited to the courts. A few countries have created government agencies dedicated to thinking about policy in the very long term. Sweden has a “Ministry of the Future,” and Wales and the United Arab Emirates have something similar.

Prominent figures in other countries are pushing their governments to follow suit. For example, the philosopher Toby Ord, who spearheads a British nonprofit called the Centre for Long-Term Resilience, published a report this month urging the UK to appoint a Chief Risk Officer, who’d be responsible for sussing out and preparing for extreme risks.

Ord emphasizes that we’re highly vulnerable to dangers in two realms: biosecurity and artificial intelligence. Powerful actors could develop bioweapons and individuals could misuse advances in synthetic biology to create man-made pandemics. AI could outstrip human-level intelligence in the coming decades and, if it’s not aligned with our values and goals, it could wreak havoc on human life.

These are potentially existential risks to humanity, and we need to devote a lot more time and money to mitigating them.

—Sigal Samuel, @SigalSamuel