As it manifests in democracy, “presentism” or “short-termism,” can be described simply as a bias in the laws in favor of present over future generations. Though some biologists argue that the success of our species can be attributed to our unique ability to think ahead, holding and manipulating a model of the future in our minds, evolution didn’t equip us to stretch that model very far. Similarly, while evolution may have programmed us to care about those around us, it (most certainly) didn’t prepare us to naturally care about everyone on our planet or everyone in distant future generations. The result? When we aggregate our individual wills in a collective system like democracy, the laws and policies produced have a myopic focus on ourselves and our present to relatively immediate future.

For much of our history, presentism’s presence in both our instinctual nature and democratic decision-making process has been an important feature, not a bug. Our ancestors’ survival depended on present conditions and the short-term future, too much time spent thinking too far ahead meant the neglect of vital, immediate needs. For democracy, presentism has been neither unwelcome nor unintended in its design given its resultant capacity to pay attention to the needs of actual citizens and to inoculate the larger process against the radical ends of utopian idealists, religious zealots, and other would-be leaders of questionable intent.

Reflecting on recent democratic trends and the civilization-level challenges we will face in the coming decades, it seems increasingly likely that the balance of presentism’s beneficial effects has reached a critical tipping point. The wholly unique challenges and threats presented by the next century require a cautious, yet urgent approach that must carefully consider the implications of decisions for future generations if the democratic process and general material well-being are to be preserved for posterity. Democracy’s endemic presentist bias and constrained ability to only effectively shape short-term outcomes diametrically oppose this vital approach and thus stands to prevent us from successfully navigating humanity’s most important century.

What’s so important about this century? What about the coming decades will be so critical for the future of human civilization? Let’s talk about exponential growth. When we say that the human economy has grown faster the larger it’s become, this might sound like it’s describing exponential growth, but it’s not. Exponential growth is exhibited, for example, if the number of people carrying a virus doubles every week. The growth rate (100% increase per week) holds fixed. The human economy, however, has grown super-exponentially on average, meaning that the bigger it has become, the faster it has doubled. The global economy produced $74 trillion in goods and services in 2019, twice as much as in 2000. Such a quick doubling was unthinkable in the Middle Ages and ancient times — the earliest doublings of the human economy likely took millennia.

Things cannot go on like this. Not only will continued acceleration of economic growth create a future radically different from our present far sooner than we think, but sustaining this level of growth will require a fundamental change to our economic paradigm. This will most likely come in the form of a “Duplicator” technology like transformative AI, an artificial intelligence powerful enough to automate the activities needed to speed up scientific and technological advancement. As hundreds of billions in private and public investment pour into AI research, it is increasingly likely that a breakthrough will come in this century. Presentism and the near-sightedness it produces has already brought us to a precarious place in human history as democracy’s slow-moving institutions and lagging regulatory bodies have been reduced to umbrellas in a hurricane as we hurtle towards this critical inflection point.

The reality of an ethically misaligned AI is far more likely than our current haphazard approach would suggest, existential risk philosopher Nick Bostrom likens it to a group of sparrows searching for an owlet to raise to do their bidding without first devising a way to teach it to not eat sparrows. Blinded by endemic presentism, Western democracies are incapable of slowing AI research to impose even a fraction of the calculated caution that the stakes more than warrant. Even if we manage to create a transformative AI whose operating principles align with the long-term wellbeing of humanity, navigating the ensuing explosion of growth and radical change will still require government free from presentist myopia. If not managed in the context of sufficiently large time scales, accelerated economic growth and technological progress will likely worsen already vast wealth disparities, exacerbate social tensions, and lead to any number of detrimental outcomes for future generations.

Even if democracy in its current, flawed form is capable of producing and navigating an AI-induced technological and economic revolution, presentist bias must be eliminated from democracy if we are to survive long enough to realize it. For several generations, the existential threats posed by global warming and nuclear warfare have been kicked down the road, purportedly requiring too much investment or multi-party cooperation to meaningfully address. Subverted for more short-term priorities, these threats have brought us to the brink of destruction. It is the presentist bias inherent within democratic decision-making that has led us to this brink and now threatens to prevent us from pulling back and avoiding civilizational collapse.

As we inch steadily closer to the 4℃ threshold and the world’s atomic superpowers remain trapped in an unimaginably tenuous kind of doomsday prisoners dilemma, the collective decisions we make in the next decades are likely to determine the fate of current generations and the very existence of future ones. Making the right decisions will require institutions that act not only in the interest of those they currently serve nor on time scales the length of election cycles.

No form of democracy implemented since its inception has been perfect, yet no other system of organization or governance has made near-global collective action and cooperation possible. As such, democracy and the decision-making process it enables is almost certainly our best shot at successfully navigating humanity’s most important century, but gripped by presentist bias, it could also be our downfall. Presentism’s endemic presence in democracy is indeed a reflection of its inherent presence in human nature. For this reason, many will argue that it is impossible to overcome without sacrificing any form of self-governance, but this defeatist critique belies a lack of imagination and ignorance of presentism’s true threat given the civilizational challenges we face. The stakes are more than high enough to warrant a radical overhaul of contemporary democracy on the level of establishing a new branch of government isolated from short-term election pressures and capable of stopping actions that are empirically shown to be capable of mortgaging humanity’s future.

While restricting our circle of compassion to those in our immediate vicinity may have served the survival of our ancestors, it is nothing more than an arbitrary exercise in the modern age of positive-sum progress. The basic instincts and behavior produced by our biological imperatives have been obsolete in their usefulness since even before the Agricultural Revolution. Acknowledging this creates an incumbent obligation to overcome them on an individual level, and to build mechanisms capable of correcting for them in the systems of government we use to aggregate our individual wills.

We exist in a moment of unparalleled potential leverage. Never in human history have a few generations been capable of bringing about so much good or bad for the future of our species. Whether you find this exhilarating, terrifying, or a combination of the two, it’s time to get to work.

Let’s Future-Proof Democracy