The Responsibility of the Long View

Across his late essays, Dyson argued that the capacity to think on long timescales was not merely an intellectual virtue but an ethical obligation for those whose work affected the future. Scientists, engineers, policymakers, and — increasingly — technologists whose tools shape the cognitive substrate of the species, all bear a duty that other actors might not bear to the same degree. The obligation is asymmetric because the capacity is asymmetric. Most people, most of the time, cannot think coherently about millennia; the institutions that make such thinking possible are rare and should be protected. But those who can think this way owe their thinking to those who cannot, because decisions made on short horizons by those with long-horizon capacity impose costs on populations that have no representation in the decision-making process.