Cultivating people’s ability and motivation to reflect on their values.
Structuring collective deliberations so that better arguments and ideas win out over time.
Problems with this:
People disagree strongly about which arguments and ideas are better than others.
The vast majority of people seem to lack both the hardware (raw cognitive capacity) and software (a reasonable philosophical tradition) to reflect on their values in a positive way.
AI seems likely to make things worse or not sufficiently better, for thesereasons.
Solving these problems seem to require (at least) some kind of breakthrough in metaphilosophy, such that we have a solution for what is actually the right way to reflect/deliberate about philosophical topics like values, and the solution is so convincing that everyone ends up agreeing with it. But I would love to know if you (or anyone else) have other ideas for solving or getting around these problems for building a viable Viatopia.
Another problem is that morality/values is in large part a status game, but talking about status is generally bad for one’s status (who wants to admit that they’re espousing some morality/values to win a status game) so this important aspect of morality/values is generally ignored for structural reasons that may be unfixable regardless of other technical and philosophical advances.
Problems with this:
People disagree strongly about which arguments and ideas are better than others.
The vast majority of people seem to lack both the hardware (raw cognitive capacity) and software (a reasonable philosophical tradition) to reflect on their values in a positive way.
AI seems likely to make things worse or not sufficiently better, for these reasons.
Solving these problems seem to require (at least) some kind of breakthrough in metaphilosophy, such that we have a solution for what is actually the right way to reflect/deliberate about philosophical topics like values, and the solution is so convincing that everyone ends up agreeing with it. But I would love to know if you (or anyone else) have other ideas for solving or getting around these problems for building a viable Viatopia.
Another problem is that morality/values is in large part a status game, but talking about status is generally bad for one’s status (who wants to admit that they’re espousing some morality/values to win a status game) so this important aspect of morality/values is generally ignored for structural reasons that may be unfixable regardless of other technical and philosophical advances.