.arunim.fyiFirst, I’ll maybe add the set of questions that I’m hoping to answer during the conference. Preferably fairly concrete, to increase the likelihood that I successfully answer them.
- What is the best concrete, plausible story we can tell of the future? Best, here, meaning that it’d be very good from whatever objective sense of morality I hold, and that it’d be a story which most everyone would like to see come true for themselves. One which I can tell random people I meet in the airport, and, if humanity shows signs of following this story, which these random people in the airport would be happy to be living in.
- I want to make note of any which seem >5% as good as WtC.
- What are enduring properties of civilization which transfer across these stories about the future? What do we do in all the stories, what do we not do in any of them? What about humanity or AI development makes us succeed when we do?
- In a viatopia way, this might help us set more concrete next steps! Or help me translate the vague sense I have of just “increase humanity’s wisdom : technological capability” into something more concrete.
- How determinist about the shape of technologies should I be? From where I stand, it seems hard to imagine that short form doomscroll content could have been stopped—the option was there all along and Tiktok just filled in the opening in the market, in some ways, maybe driven there by the incentives.
- Is changing the incentives tractable?
- Post-AGI, if money doesn’t matter, how similar are the incentives from power-maximization to the current incentives of money-maximization?
- Will power-maximization be the incentive most analogous to market pressure today?