CONCEPT
Are We Being Good Ancestors?
Salk's five-word reorientation of ethical evaluation — from the self to the lineage, from what works now to what endures — addressed to every generation by the ones that will inherit its consequences.
The question appeared quietly in Salk's later work and has outlived almost everything else he wrote after the vaccine. It asks every person making every consequential decision to imagine the judgment of those who will inherit the consequences — not a divine judge, not a moral philosopher, but their grandchildren. Salk arrived at the question through biology rather than philosophy, observing that every organism persisting over evolutionary time does so because it serves not only its own survival but the survival of the system within which it is embedded. A generation optimizing only for itself, without regard for the generations to follow, behaves like a cancer within the body of the species — not out of malice but out of a failure of imagination. The question has become the most widely-quoted ethical instrument for evaluating technology's long-term impact.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The question operates at a different timescale than the one