Maybe Future Generations Will Be Just Fine

Cass R. Sunstein is one of America's foremost legal scholars; he is also a big fan of science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Sunstein thinks that science fiction can be a useful tool to inoculate people against status quo bias--our tendency to resist anything new and unfamiliar. "If you love science fiction, you find it fun, and maybe a good little chill goes down your spine, when you think of things that hadn't been dreamt of until 1990 or 2005, and those things excite you, as well as maybe scaring you," Sunstein says in Episode 468 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Sunstein's new book Averting Catastrophe lays out an approach for evaluating unpredictable threats such as asteroids, AI, climate change, and pandemics. One of the book's more science fictional ideas is that people might not need to worry so much about the well-being of future generations, an idea that Sunstein attributes to Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling.