Thank you! A few quick thoughts on some great points:
Other than Karnofsky’s piece, I didn’t find too much empirical research trying to understand why people find utopias appealing, but I share the intuition that a lack of scarcity/great wealth is often a plausible reason. There’s an interesting open empirical question about how that relates with people’s views about freedom, and a related normative one about our intuitions regarding the importance of freedom more generally.
Agree that it’s very hard to construct pluralism-respecting utopias and even harder to work out ways to get there. In the post, main aim was to question the idea that the former is impossible.
Definitely think the question of how useful AI ideal governance theories can be is next step of discussion after establishing ways in which they can be helpful. I don’t have too many abstract thoughts on how many people should be working in this sub-field (this may depend on what problem is trying to be solved at a given time) - mainly wanted to establish that, e.g., people interested in policy, shouldn’t see it as totally irrelevant approach.
Thank you! A few quick thoughts on some great points:
Other than Karnofsky’s piece, I didn’t find too much empirical research trying to understand why people find utopias appealing, but I share the intuition that a lack of scarcity/great wealth is often a plausible reason. There’s an interesting open empirical question about how that relates with people’s views about freedom, and a related normative one about our intuitions regarding the importance of freedom more generally.
Agree that it’s very hard to construct pluralism-respecting utopias and even harder to work out ways to get there. In the post, main aim was to question the idea that the former is impossible.
Definitely think the question of how useful AI ideal governance theories can be is next step of discussion after establishing ways in which they can be helpful. I don’t have too many abstract thoughts on how many people should be working in this sub-field (this may depend on what problem is trying to be solved at a given time) - mainly wanted to establish that, e.g., people interested in policy, shouldn’t see it as totally irrelevant approach.