Chapter 6
The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
—Nietzsche1
Capability Brown was England’s most celebrated gardener. He’s also a teensy bit responsible for the impending extinction of the human species.
Born Lancelot Brown in 1715, he was given “Capability” as a nickname; it was a word he used often when explaining to English aristocrats that their estates had “great capability for improvement.”2 He preferred a naturalistic look to his gardens: replacing the heavily manicured hedges, stone pathways, and grand fountains typical of seventeenth-century formal French gardens with grand vistas overlooking lakes, groves of statuesque trees, and sprawling lawns. He upgraded the gardens of 170 British estates in his day, including Highclere Castle, which has become famous as the exterior location for the historical drama Downton Abbey. The opening credits depict a man and his dog walking over a perfectly manicured lawn—originally designed by Capability—with the castle looming in the background. Capability’s dangerous legacy is shaped by precisely this kind of lawn.
Notably, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were huge fans of his work. Both Jefferson’s Monticello estate and Washington’s Mount Vernon estate were modeled to resemble a Capability design and are considered some of the most famous gardens in the United States. They were portrayed on countless postcards strewn across the kitchen tables of millions of American homes by the early nineteenth century. These iconic houses had sprawling lawns where, if the postcards were to be believed, well-heeled sophisticates would stroll about with parasols playing badminton. Lawns were part of a burgeoning aesthetic ethos suggesting that the American experiment would yield domestic prosperity—and plenty of free time to smack shuttlecocks about—for all those who wished to work hard and make something of themselves. It was a dream that applied to everyone except, of course, the enslaved people who were forced to trim and maintain those lawns, which is the kind of paradox the country reckons with to this day.
In the early nineteenth century, the average American didn’t have the time, money, or enslaved labor necessary to cultivate a lawn. Only the ultra-rich could afford such luxuries. With the invention of the lawn mower in 1830 by Edwin Beard Budding, however, the lawn became far more accessible. Over the course of the next century, they grew to become symbols of personal—and national—prosperity. As the car became the dominant mode of transportation in America, the front garden became an opportunity to display one’s success, letting motorists ooh and ahh as they rode down suburban streets. A close-cropped front lawn tucked behind a white picket fence soon became—and remains to this day—the ultimate symbol of Americana.
Americans love their lawns. There are 163,812 square kilometers (about forty million acres) of domestic lawns in the United States right now.3 That’s equivalent to the size of the state of Florida. Twenty percent of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Connecticut are covered by lawns.4 A whopping 75 percent of the 116 million households in the US have a lawn of some kind.5 Setting aside all the other ways in which our species has transformed the land on this planet, our obsession with creating lawns has altered the landscape in ways that have no equivalent in the animal kingdom. The closest you’ll get is the vast network of ancient termite mounds in eastern Brazil. These huge mounds (typically eight feet tall) crisscross an area of Brazil totaling 230,000 square kilometers, and can be seen from space.6 They are built more or less every twenty meters, and there are two hundred million of them. The termites began building these mounds almost four thousand years ago. They formed slowly as termites came to the surface to toss out the unwanted dirt from the network of tunnels excavated for transportation and their living quarters. They are, essentially, majestic garbage dumps. But, unlike human lawns, these mounds create a positive impact on the environment, forming the bottom layer of the Brazilian caatinga: a desert forest teeming with biodiversity and home to 187 species of bees, 516 birds, and 148 mammals, not to mention more than a thousand plant species.7
I’ve probably spent a thousand hours cutting grass for personal or professional reasons over the course of my life. And, frankly, I feel hoodwinked by Capability Brown and the Founding Fathers. Lawns are a monoculture wasteland that are almost entirely useless as a habitat for wildlife. They don’t provide us with any food, but nonetheless require a huge investment in time, money, and resources. They are a love letter to conspicuous consumption, a term coined by economist Thorstein Veblen in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class, and defined as “the purchase of goods or services for the specific purpose of displaying one’s wealth.”8 Lawns are also a giant middle finger to the environmental movement. Americans use nine billion gallons of water a day on lawns alone—that’s about one-third of all domestic water usage.9 About half of that is wasted, never reaching the roots due to evaporation, wind, and runoff. Add to that the 1.2 billion gallons of gasoline used in lawnmowers each year, which is even worse for the environment than it sounds. Since lawn mower engines are nowhere near as efficient as, say, those found in cars, they end up using more gasoline and creating more CO2. Put another way, using a gas-powered mower for one hour is the equivalent of driving a hundred miles in a car.10 The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that lawn maintenance accounts for 4 percent of annual total CO2 emissions in the US.11 That’s a crap ton of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere each year in pursuit of—well, what exactly?
Of course, it’s not really Capability’s fault, right? He couldn’t have predicted where his horticultural endeavors would lead. Nonetheless, let’s assume a hypothetical. If a time traveler from today were to go back to the eighteenth century, sit Capability down, and explain how his lawn idea would evolve into a cultural obsession that would contribute to climate change and threaten the existence of the human species, would he have shelved the idea? I doubt it. Humans have an amazing ability to justify our actions even if there is evidence that there will be negative consequences in the future. Even the most charismatic and persuasive time traveler would have a hard time convincing Capability to give up his life’s work. Consider it this way: We now know the dangers of burning fossil fuels, and yet our lawn obsession continues. Threats of a postapocalyptic Earth will not stop us from maintaining our lawns, even if we understand the risks associated with this nonsensical yet widespread habit.
This brand of cognitive dissonance is what I call prognostic myopia. Prognostic myopia is the human capacity to think about and alter the future coupled with an inability to actually care all that much about what happens in the future. It’s caused by the human ability to make complex decisions availing of our unique cognitive skills that result in long-term consequences. But because our minds evolved primarily to deal with immediate—not future—outcomes, we rarely experience or even understand the consequences of these long-term decisions. It is the most dangerous flaw in human thinking. So dangerous that it might lead to the extinction of our species. Which is why I will dedicate a whole chapter to explaining what prognostic myopia is, how it came into existence, how it affects our everyday lives, and why it’s an extinction-level threat to humanity.
What is prognostic myopia?
Like all animals, humans live in a world where we must make decisions on a day-to-day basis that satisfy our day-to-day needs: food, shelter, sex, etc. This kind of in-the-moment decision-making is as old as life itself and fundamental to biology. But the human capacity for causal reasoning, episodic foresight, conscious deliberation, etc. gives us the ability to enact solutions to these daily now-problems with future consequences on a scale that has never been seen in the history of life on this planet. We can invent solutions that rely on technology and engineering whose, as Nietzsche wrote, “thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.” Like all animals, our biology compels us to deal with the here and now, but unlike other animals, our decisions can generate technologies that will have harmful impacts on the world for generations to come. This disconnect is at the heart of prognostic myopia.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you wanted to grab a snack right now. Ten thousand years ago, you might’ve walked a few feet into the forest, stuck your hand into a log, and yanked out a handful of tasty termites. Boom. Problem solved. Snack acquired. These days, you might walk a few feet into the kitchen and grab a banana. Same problem (hunger), same solution (food).
The difference between the two is that the availability of the banana today is shaped entirely by human-made, technological processes that have added unimaginable complexity to the simple act of grabbing a snack. And these processes generate long-term consequences we hadn’t considered. What do I mean by these human-made processes?
If you’re like me, you live in a part of the world where bananas do not grow naturally. Most bananas—the ones sold by Dole, Del Monte, Chiquita, etc.—are grown on plantations in South America. Which means that these bananas will need to be trucked to the nearest South American port, loaded onto a plane or a boat, and sent halfway around the world, processed domestically, distributed in grocery stores, and then, because you purchased it, land in your fruit bowl. If you shop in a supermarket with ludicrous packaging policies, you might have to first unwrap your banana from a plastic bag. You will then marvel at its color and shape, two factors engineered by a cocktail of fertilizers and pesticides used to grow them. Obviously, there is an intense carbon footprint associated with shipping bananas around the world and stuffing them into bags made from petroleum products. Not to mention the environmental impacts of pesticide- and fertilizer-based monoculture on lands (usually ancient rain forests) that have been cleared of native vegetation to support our banana cravings. The point is, our hankering for a snack in the twenty-first century is identical to what it was ten thousand years ago, but our complex cognition allows us to engage in activities (e.g., oil and gas extraction, mechanized farming, soil depletion) on a massive scale, which is transforming this planet into an uninhabitable shithole. Our kitchens are full of foods that come from a global agricultural-industrial complex that is fundamentally problematic to the survival of the human species.
This banana example highlights the two major negative consequences of prognostic myopia. The first is that humans, unlike other animals, can create long-term solutions to our problems that will have unforeseen consequences on future generations. Like the clearing of rain forests so we can satisfy our urge for a banana, or the depletion of our water reserves so we can grow our Capability Brown–inspired lawns. The second is that even in those cases where we can foresee negative consequences of our long-term solutions, our minds are not wired to truly care about those consequences in the way we would if the consequences were more immediate. You’re not wired to care about the future impacts of clearing Brazilian rain forests for banana monoculture. You’re wired to pick up that banana at the grocery store and throw it in your cart. This kind of indifference is exactly why a time traveler could never convince Capability Brown to un-invent lawns.
To understand how prognostic myopia came into being, we need to first understand why animal decision-making is so bad at dealing with future problems.
Humans can’t feel the future
We learned in the previous chapter how subjective experience (i.e., consciousness) allows our brains to recruit multiple cognitive systems to help make complex decisions. Humans have several unique cognitive abilities that can step out onto that improv stage and receive the spotlight of subjective awareness when we are making decisions, including causal inference, mental time travel, episodic foresight, and temporal self-awareness. But there is a plethora of unconscious cognitive systems that also contribute. These two systems—the conscious and unconscious—work in tandem to generate our decision-making behavior. And ultimately lead to prognostic myopia. To understand how this works, let’s start with a discussion of my favorite animal in the world: my daughter.
My daughter, like many school-aged kids, is grumpy in the mornings. She can get a bit snippy, and is prone to bleak tweeny pronouncements, like “I hate school and everyone and everything.” It’s not much fun for anyone. Here’s a pro parenting tip: Telling your tween to “stop being so negative” is pointless. Instead, why not try an old-school behavioral manipulation technique: operant conditioning. It’s such a powerful means of unconsciously modifying behavior that you can use it on your child even if they are fully aware that they’re being manipulated.
With the goal of getting my daughter to be nicer in the mornings, I sat her down and explained how my operant conditioning plan for her was going to work (and what operant conditioning was). The basic idea is that she would get an immediate, positive reward every time she produced a desired behavior. In our case, she would receive one piece of cheese popcorn every time she said something nice. Soon, her brain would make an indelible association between saying nice things and getting a yummy treat. Her subconscious mind would then prompt her to generate positive statements to get the endorphin hit that comes with popcorn consumption. This is exactly how a scientist might approach an animal behavior experiment, but in this case, I could tell my animal subject exactly what was in store for her. We both accepted that what we were doing was trying to train her brain to generate more happiness, a goal she was fully on board with.
And it worked like gangbusters.
Each morning, I would fill a Ziploc bag with cheese popcorn and carry it around with me, tossing her a piece whenever she said things like “It’s cold out this morning, but at least I have a warm jacket.” Or, “I’m looking forward to eating macaroni and cheese for lunch today.” Our mornings were suddenly brighter and happier, and everyone’s mood improved. She wasn’t necessarily happy to go to school, but she was happier than she was before.
This is one of the oldest methods that brains have for generating decisions. From fruit flies to tweens, brains learn quickly that generating certain behaviors will result in immediate positive (or negative) consequences. It’s a simple, ancient decision-making hack that generates a kind of heuristic. In psychology, a heuristic is a mental shortcut or rule of thumb, often unconscious, that helps us make quick decisions. My daughter no longer needed to waste time thinking about the half a dozen possible things she could say around the breakfast table, and micro-analyze the extent to which each remark would annoy her parents. Instead, operant conditioning shoved her brain down the path of pleasantness.
Obviously, a brain that is making snap decisions is one that is not considering long-term consequences. Subconscious, snap decision-making, then, is integral to the problem of prognostic myopia. To appreciate its role, we need to appreciate just how commonplace these subconscious heuristics are in human decision-making.
If you’ve walked through an airport bookstore in the past twenty years, chances are you’ve stumbled across any number of popular science books chock-full of examples of ways in which human decision-making is governed—if not dominated—by unconscious processes. Like Blink by Malcom Gladwell, which argues that the decisions we make automatically (i.e., without conscious thought) are often better than ones we spend hours or days pondering. Or Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which shows just how often we rely on our fast/automatic/unconscious thinking to make decisions (i.e., System 1), vs. our slow/calculating/conscious thinking (i.e., System 2). He describes them as follows: “Systems 1 and 2 are both active whenever we are awake. System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged. System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification.”12
Many influential books expound on the idea of the power and prevalence of unconscious thought, including Nudge by Richard H. Thaler, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, Sway by Ori Brafman, and Why Choose This Book? by Read Montague. Among them is Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational. Ariely is a behavioral economist who studies human decision-making and has helped popularize the idea that humans are not the kind of rational, conscious decision-makers that we’d like to think we are. He argues that we are pushed—unconsciously—into making decisions by the structure of the environment around us. It’s the external environment that triggers heuristics and cognitive biases that generate our behavior without any need for conscious rumination or rationality. An example he often cites is organ donor behavior.13 A now famous study by Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein found that some European countries had extremely high rates of people who consented to donating their organs after death, while some had very low rates.14 These consent rates didn’t seem to have anything to do with cultural differences. Countries like the Netherlands had a donation consent rate of 27.5 percent, whereas Belgium, their immediate neighbor, and with whom they share close cultural and linguistic ties, had a consent rate of 98 percent. The significant difference had nothing to do with the way that either felt about organ donation or end-of-life decisions. Instead, it had to do with the organ donation form they were being asked to fill out when applying for a license.
The Dutch form asked people to check a box if they would like to opt in to the organ donation program. The Belgian form, by contrast, asked them to check a box if they would like to opt out. It turned out that the decision to check the box on either form was not made because people gave much thought to the organ donation question. They usually just left the box unchecked on both forms. Humans have an unconscious bias toward sticking with the status quo. When we are tasked with taking action to change the status quo vs. maintaining course, we will go with the path of least resistance. In this case, people just didn’t want to go through the trouble of checking a box. When countries change their license forms to the “check this box to opt out” version of the question, organ donation consent skyrockets. It is the environment—the form, in this case—that is steering people to make an unconscious decision using a hidden heuristic.
Importantly, when you ask people why they made the decision to opt in (or not) to an organ donation program, they are wholly unaware of the unconscious thoughts that nudged them into action. “What happens is that people tell stories about why they made those decisions,” Ariely told NPR’s Guy Raz. “They portray them as—as if they spent the whole week on that decision. People who were in the opt-in form say things like, you know, I’m really worried about the medical system and whether some physicians will pull the plug a little too early if I do this. And people in the opt-out form say, you know, my parents raised me to be a caring, wonderful human being.”15
These people are not lying. Their conscious minds are just searching for a post hoc explanation as to why they did what they did. But this is a delusion. “We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver’s seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we make and the direction our life takes,” Ariely writes in Predictably Irrational. “But, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires—with how we want to view ourselves—than with reality.”
This organ donor story is particularly relevant to the problem of prognostic myopia. The question of what should happen to your liver or heart after you die requires you to engage in exceedingly complex thinking. You obviously have full-blown death wisdom. You are also being asked to predict not just how you would feel about donating your organs years or decades into the future (i.e., an ability to model future mental states), but also how other people will feel about this decision (e.g., the recipients of your organs) via theory of mind. The organ donation question requires the most complex matrix of human cognition and decision-making thrust onto that stage of consciousness we discussed in Chapter 5 that other animals lack.
And yet, our decision to donate our livers ultimately comes down to a single, unassuming too-lazy-to-tick-a-box heuristic that has little to do with all this complex cognition, and that never makes its way into conscious awareness. We are pushed into this decision by unseen forces in our minds. There are so many examples of research that reveal the hidden forces that control our decisions that it makes you wonder if humans have any free will at all. Here are three of my favorites:
Women will be more attracted to men who are not their sexual partner just after their ovaries release an egg, and before their period starts.16 They will be even more attracted to these men if their current sexual partner has an asymmetrical face. So if you are a straight or bi lady who suddenly finds yourself attracted to your local Starbucks barista, it’s not just because he’s a fun conversationalist with a cute smile. It’s because your current partner has a crooked nose and your body is trying to mate with someone more symmetrical.
If you are a white guy living in, say, New York City, and I ask you to look at a video screen and then record the speed at which you are able to recognize the image of a gun that is slowly coming into focus, you will do it faster if I first flash an image of a Black guy’s face on-screen.17 Even if the flash happens so fast that you are not consciously aware of it. Why? Because white guys who grow up in North America develop an unconscious bias that associates Black men with crime. This will be true even for white guys who swear that they don’t have a racist bone in their body.
You are more likely to buy jam if you are looking at six varieties of jam stacked on a shelf than twenty-four varieties.18 Why? Because human minds experience choice overload when there are too many options to consider. The more jams to choose from, the more likely we are to buy nothing. Our jam-buying decisions are often based on the configuration of the jam jars on the shelves, not the contents of the jam jars themselves.
I could go on citing these cognitive biases and acquired heuristics until the cows come home. But the take-home message is this: Even when we think our conscious decisions are arrived at via slow, deliberative, rational thinking, they are often the product of—or at least influenced by—a whole lot of unconscious processes bubbling away outside our awareness.
The fact that so much of human thinking and everyday decision-making is influenced by unconscious forces is important for understanding prognostic myopia. It drives home the point that our decisions are often the product of unseen emotions and heuristics in our minds, even if we are still consciously pondering a problem. And because these emotions and heuristics are designed exclusively for solving immediate—and not long-term future—problems, there is space for prognostic myopia to take root.
When we are faced with a decision involving the non-immediate future—whether it’s an hour, tomorrow, or one year from now—our capacity for episodic foresight and temporal self-awareness allows us to project ourselves into that future. We can then imagine how we might feel based on the different choices we could make. But these far-future imagined scenarios, born of our uniquely human brand of cognition, do not carry the same emotional weight as those scenarios occurring in the immediate future. Being consciously aware of our hunger right now is what recruits that army of unconscious capacities that trigger our biases and heuristics to help us decide what to do in the present. Even though we can imagine being hungry five months from now, that army of unconscious capabilities is not exerting as much influence on our decision-making as it would if we were hungry now. These unconscious processes are not designed to understand the future. That’s the paradox of prognostic myopia: We can imagine how we might feel in the future, but those feelings are not as meaningful to us as our current feelings. When episodic foresight steps onto that improv stage of subjective experience and gets broadcast to the subconscious parts of the mind, some of those parts simply don’t understand what they are looking at. They are ancient processes evolved over the course of hundreds of millions of years to deal with the present. The distant future means nothing to them. So our capacity to understand the future and even envision ourselves in it is competing with decision-making systems whose component parts do not truly understand what they are being asked to do.
Now that we understand a bit more about how decision-making works for our species, and how prognostic myopia gets involved, it’s time to see what happens when future-focused decision-making goes wrong.
The day-to-day problem of prognostic myopia
Prognostic myopia makes it difficult for us to make good decisions about our future because we’re heavily influenced by our problems in the here and now. To see how this difficulty affects us on a day-to-day basis, I will provide examples from my life. I will compare the decisions I have made over the past forty-eight hours to the recommendations of a decision-making robot who always knows the optimal solution to all my problems. I am calling this robot Prognostitron. Let’s say that Prognostitron’s goal is to maximize my health and happiness, as well as the health and happiness of my future offspring. You’d think I would have that same goal, but as you will see from my actual decisions, that’s clearly not the case.
Example number one: Justin wants to sing a song.
For a few years now, I have been getting together on a weekly basis with a few friends to play music. We are all middle-aged dads who were in rock bands in high school. It’s the most cliché of all possible midlife crisis scenarios. At one of our recent practices we were really feeling the groove when ten-thirty p.m. rolled around. It was a school night for our kids, so none of us should really have been out past eleven, but we were having a blast. As we eyed our instrument cases and started to make a move to pack up, one of the lads asked: “Do we have time for one more song?”
Decision time. Now, Prognostitron would say that the only reasonable course of action would be to say no—to pack up my gear and be home in bed by eleven. My health and happiness levels will be maximized if I were to get a minimum of seven hours of sleep. That is an undeniable fact. So what did I do?
“Let’s do one more song,” I said.
In that moment, I was consciously aware of the right thing to do. But my mind was flooded with a ton of competing information—some of it unconscious—pushing me to stay. I was obviously enjoying myself, so my brain was keen to continue the endorphin hit that comes with singing nineties grunge music at the top of my lungs. But maybe I was also worried about disappointing the other guys if I were to leave early. My group in particular isn’t prone to toxic peer pressure, but there’s no escaping the deep-seated social concern that is fundamental to the human condition. My unconscious desire to maintain social bonds with my peers nudged me to stay. And then, of course, I had the ability to envision (via episodic foresight) what I would be like the next day if I decided to stay up past my bedtime: a grumpy, groggy mess. We all know this feeling—how many of us have stayed up to binge watch a show despite knowing we have to be up early the next morning? Despite my capacity for episodic foresight and the ability to understand—intellectually—that I would be tired, the fun I was having in that moment made it impossible for me to choose the best option.
And so, we played a couple more songs and I didn’t get home until midnight. And I was a total wreck the next day. This is prognostic myopia in action: I was able to know exactly what staying up late would do to my future affective and physiological states on an intellectual level, but my mind justified doing the wrong thing because I couldn’t feel the consequences of my actions in a way that was meaningful to my decision-making process. I knew intellectually that I would be tired. And when I woke up the next day, I was exactly that: tired. But, until that moment occurred, the full consequences of my decisions hadn’t hit me.
Example number two: Justin wants to watch a Hallmark movie.
As a freelancer, I work from my home office most of the time. I do not have a boss looking over my shoulder making sure that I stay on task. I only have my own to-do lists and deadlines and a vague sense of “you should be doing something.” In other words, self-discipline determines my productivity. Yesterday, however, I wasn’t really feeling it. My procrastination levels were at an all-time high. To help me out of my funk, my wife asked if I might want to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie with her after lunch. Our relationship involves a lot of shared film-watching where we laugh ourselves silly at cinematic train wrecks. It’s a surefire way to elevate my spirits, and she was right to suggest it.
I now had a decision to make: spend the afternoon watching Netflix, or go back to work. Prognostitron would suggest the obvious answer: Go sit behind your computer and get some work done. The consequences of not doing so are potentially dire. Missing a deadline or disappointing a client who had hired me for a job could cause me to lose out on future gigs, which would cause serious emotional distress, not to mention financial hardship. It’s a no-brainer: Skip the Hallmark movie and just go work.
So what did I choose to do? Obviously, I watched A Christmas Prince. Which, by the way, isn’t a train wreck at all. Rose McIver is a delight, I tell you.
But how did I justify this? I knew just as well as Prognostitron what was at stake, and what the right thing to do was. But I also wanted to do something to remove the negative thoughts running through my head in that moment. And the easiest way to do that was to distract myself. And of course, watching a movie would mean spending quality time with my life partner, which is inherently rewarding. My mind was having a hard time balancing the need for immediate gratification with the long-term negative consequences of my decision. I was strangely indifferent to my future suffering, thanks to prognostic myopia.
Edward Wasserman and Thomas Zentall, two psychologists famous for their work with animal cognition, penned an essay in 2020 for NBC News trying to explain why humans like me are so bad at caring about the long-term consequences of our decisions:
Urgent survival needs (believed to be mediated by older brain systems that we share with many other animals) mean that we still engage in impulsive behaviors. And those behaviors, which once promoted our survival and reproductive success, are now suboptimal because we live in an environment in which long-term contingencies play an increasingly important part in our lives.19
This encapsulates why my daily life is so filled with prognostic myopia. But it also explains one of its far more sinister consequences. Because humans live in a world loaded with long-term contingencies, our poor decisions are not just affecting our daily lives. Humans alive today are making decisions whose negative consequences won’t be felt by other humans until many years from now. Often, many generations into the future. Yet, we simply don’t have minds designed to feel these consequences. In fact, in terms of decision-making, the further into the future we go, the less we care. To imagine a world three hundred years from now in which you are already dead removes even more of the emotional import that might be present in episodic foresight. We are no longer putting our temporal selves at the center of these time-traveling projections, but instead are trying to envision our hypothetical progeny walking through a nigh unimaginable hypothetical landscape. It simply becomes an intellectual exercise so far removed from the kinds of decisions our minds evolved to make. And this is how prognostic myopia might kill us.
The catastrophic future of prognostic myopia
The Global Challenges Foundation released a report in 2016 calculating that there is a “9.5% chance of human extinction within the next hundred years.”20 The three most likely ways were identified as: 1) nuclear holocaust, 2) climate change, and 3) ecological collapse.21 Each of these is a result of human cognition bringing technologies into the world (e.g., nuclear weapons, combustion engines) that will damage the Earth in such a horrendous way that it can no longer sustain human life. It’s not that we simply didn’t understand the potential negative consequences of some of these technologies when they first arose. The quest to split the atom, for example, was undertaken specifically because we desired the negative consequence (i.e., wanted to invent bombs capable of killing millions of people in one go). Those responsible for creating nuclear weapons openly blamed (or maybe praised?) prognostic myopia for allowing them to do it. Robert Christy, one of the scientists with the Manhattan Project, once said: “I’d seen pictures of Hiroshima, of people who suffered very severe burns with flesh hanging in shreds from their arms. You don’t think about those things when you’re working on it. You think about solving the immediate problems.”22
It’s easy for us to shove those future-predicting cognitive skills off the stage of consciousness and instead direct our minds to dealing with problems in the now. This capacity is closely related to the kind of denial that Ajit Varki suspects is vital to the human ability to compartmentalize thoughts of our own (and others’) death. Denial helps us thrust these thoughts into the darkness of our unconscious and get on with the business of building a bomb.
Which brings us to the best example of the existential threat of prognostic myopia. It’s a story of decision-making and denial that covers both the number two and number three most likely means of human extinction as pinpointed by the Global Challenges Foundation. And it involves a decision to bring something into the world with full knowledge of the destruction it would cause. I am talking, of course, about fossil fuels.
Let’s start with this caveat. There was no single moment in recent history in which we switched from knowing that carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels might be causing climate change to being sure that they do. It took time for consensus to build. That being said, this is what we know about the oil industry’s own understanding of its role in causing severe, extinction-level damage to the global environment. In 1968, Elmer Robinson and R. C. Robbins, two researchers from the Stanford Research Institute, presented a report to the American Petroleum Institute on atmospheric pollutants.23 They took pains to include information about the dangers of carbon dioxide being released by the burning of fossil fuels. They warned that “CO2 plays a significant role in establishing the thermal balance of the earth” and that too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would result in a “green-house effect,” which would result in “the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans and an increase in photosynthesis.” They conclude that “man is now engaged in a vast geophysical experiment with his environment, the earth. Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000 and these could bring about climatic changes,” and that “there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe.” In other words, Robinson and Robbins explained to the oil industry what the prevailing science at the time had concluded. None of this should come as any surprise—more than fifty years on, these findings are very much in the mainstream.
The oil industry, however, responded by not slowing the extraction of fossil fuels.
Ten years later, in 1978, the director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies, Dr. James Hansen, was called before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. In his testimony, he confirmed to the US government—and the world—that what Robinson and Robbins had warned about was in fact an undeniable reality. He stated that “global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming… In my opinion, the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.” The cause, as Hansen explained to the Senate, was carbon dioxide being released from burning fossil fuels.
The oil industry, however, responded once again by not slowing the extraction of fossil fuels.
In 2014, ExxonMobil released a report in which it stated that “ExxonMobil takes the risk of climate change seriously, and continues to take meaningful steps to help address the risk and to ensure our facilities, operations and investments are managed with this risk in mind.”24 It was widely reported as the first time that ExxonMobil acknowledged that climate change was “real,” and that the fossil fuel industry had a part to play in setting things right.
The oil industry, however, responded—can you guess?—by not slowing the extraction of fossil fuels.
Why did the scientific evidence not sway people in the fossil fuel industry? Why has there been an overall annual increase in fossil fuel extraction since Robinson and Robbins’s first report in 1968 that continues to this day?25 If the stakes are so high—and we’ve known about them for so long—why didn’t the industry act sooner? The answer is that at no time did the decision-makers in the fossil fuel industry feel a sense of urgency at each stage in which the problem was put before them. The problem they were being asked to consider involved the far future. One hundred years down the road. A time when they would be long dead. Besides, in terms of their immediate interests, how much wealth has been generated from the fossil fuel industry? How many millionaires or billionaires has it made? How many jobs has it created? Our present and immediate future prosperity is predicated on the proliferation of cars, trains, and airplanes, all of which run on what the oil industry makes. This is prognostic myopia in action. They could just ignore the evidence, however damning, because they were focused on the immediate problem (and immediate benefits). Just like Robert Christy did when tinkering away on the A-bomb. Of course, sometimes they did more than just ignore; sometimes they actively obfuscated the truth. The (now former) Senior Director of Federal Relations at Exxon Mobil Corporation Keith McCoy was caught on tape in July 2021 admitting that the company had done just that. “Did we fight aggressively against some of the science? Yes. Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments, we were looking out for our shareholders.”
However, I don’t see Keith McCoy as a mustache-twirling villain as much as I see him as a victim of prognostic myopia. Like most humans, he’s not equipped to truly feel what it will be like to experience the future consequences of his current actions. None of us are. And consequently, our social, financial, and political systems reflect this fact. “Our political-legal system was developed to address structured, short-term, direct cause and effect issues (the exact opposite of the climate issue),” suggested the 2020 Global Catastrophic Risks report.26 Which explains why both governments and businesses are so slow to act when looking at reports forecasting our impending extinction. We’ve built our societies on the scaffolding of prognostic myopia.
But there are the occasional people who do seem to fully feel the distant future, and who are trying their darndest to nudge the political-legal systems into action. Greta Thunberg, for example. In her speech to the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos in January 2020, as part of her skolstrejk för klimatet campaign, she spoke like someone whose brain is overcome with a sense of fear in the here and now when envisioning future scenarios:
We all have a choice. We can create transformational action that will safeguard the living conditions for future generations. Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail. We must change almost everything in our current societies. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.27
Clearly, our species is not acting as if our house is on fire. Despite the widespread awareness of climate change as a real problem caused by human carbon emissions, and despite the fact that nations and world leaders have promised to curb emissions and done things like sign the Paris Agreement (which aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions), the reality is that we, all over the planet, are only increasing the amount of carbon we’re releasing. Greenhouse gas emissions are on track to rise by 16 percent by 2030.28 This will cause global atmospheric temperature to increase by 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. An increase of this magnitude will result in severe floods, crop failures, heavy rainfall, heat waves, and wildfires that will render most of the planet uninhabitable.29 The increase has already begun to hurt the world’s most vulnerable populations. Which is exactly why there is that 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within a hundred years. However dire, thanks to prognostic myopia, it doesn’t look like there’s enough political will to stop it from happening. Which is why Greta called out world leaders again at the Youth4Climate summit in Milan, Italy, in September 2021:
Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great but so far have not led to action. Our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty promises. They’ve now had 30 years of blah, blah, blah and where has that led us? We can still turn this around—it is entirely possible. It will take immediate, drastic annual emission reductions. But not if things go on like today. Our leaders’ intentional lack of action is a betrayal toward all present and future generations.30
Prognostic myopia clearly affects our world leaders as well as all of us. Nobody is immune to the cognitive dissonance it generates. Even when the stakes are as high as global extinction. Consider that a child born today is five times more likely to die in a global extinction event than in a car crash. Think about that for a second. Think about how often people drive, and then read that sentence again. Yet, if I am being honest, I cannot personally feel that danger at all.
If you told me that if I continued to drive my daughter to school every day, there was a 9.5 percent chance that she would die in a car crash, I would almost certainly find alternate means as quickly as I could. I can feel that danger deep in my bones. But if you told me that if I continued to drive my daughter to school, there was a 9.5 percent chance that my great-great-granddaughter would die from ecological collapse, would I stop driving? No. Even though that’s what awaits my family in the future, here I am, driving my Subaru around like everything is fine.
Humans simply do not have the ability to evaluate the consequences of our actions in the long term using the same criteria we use for short-term decisions. What about Greta? Why is she unique, or seemingly unique, compared to so many of us? Greta has credited her autism with giving her an ability to stay focused on future problems and not be distracted by the pull of prognostic myopia.31 “I have Aspergers and that means I’m sometimes a bit different from the norm,” she tweeted. “And—given the right circumstances—being different is a superpower.”32 Other than a handful of prescient exceptions, we, as a species, are not designed to feel that way about our decisions. Many of us do not have superpowers like Greta; we are, simply, crippled with prognostic myopia.
I would like to take a moment to directly address those of you who might be reading these words at the turn of the millennium, including my own great-great-grandchildren. On behalf of my generation, I apologize. I was born in the 1970s and came of age during the industrial and capitalist boom that gripped North America in the ’80s and ’90s. There was almost no discussion about how our behavior might affect the health of the Earth. Although plenty of scientists talked about things like “recycling” or “acid rain” or “global warming” at the time, everyday folks didn’t really get into the whole climate change thing until it became clear—at the turn of the current millennium—that we were headed down a dark path. I also want to personally say sorry: I keep driving around in my Subaru despite knowing exactly what this means to you.
As humans, we are victims of our own success. There has never been a species on this planet capable of fundamentally transforming the Earth’s environment like we have. Now, then, comes the time for putting everything into perspective. With the specter of prognostic myopia looming darkly over us, it is time to determine the value of human intelligence.