Executive summary: This post outlines a shortlist of high-leverage “Viatopia” interventions—practical projects to move humanity toward Will MacAskill’s vision of a world able to steer itself toward near-best futures—ranging from AI-assisted research infrastructure and reflective governance systems to value-shaping educational and economic institutions. Written as part of the Essays on Longtermism competition, it bridges philosophical longtermism and implementable field-building, offering concrete blueprints for action while emphasizing epistemic humility about the author’s AI-assisted writing process.
Key points:
Purpose and framing: The essay translates the theoretical concept of Viatopia into actionable interventions, aiming to fill the gap between longtermist philosophy and practical implementation infrastructure.
Meta-infrastructure focus: Early interventions prioritize research automation, coordination mechanisms, and field-building institutions that compound effectiveness—such as fellowships, research registries, and incubators for Better Futures and Deep Reflection projects.
Crux platform: Proposes Crux, an AI-assisted platform for systematically mapping and sharing crucial considerations across the longtermist community, incentivizing clarity, calibration, and rapid collective learning.
Human-AI symbiosis: Introduces a framework for differentially accelerating human wisdom, wellbeing, and agency alongside AI progress, preventing loss of human relevance while leveraging AI for moral and strategic enhancement.
Automated macrostrategy: Advocates for AI-enabled workflows to scale strategic reasoning and manage the “multiplicative crucial considerations” problem, building automation infrastructure before transformative AI arrives.
The Good World Project: Describes large-scale AI-mediated elicitation of public visions for the future and synthesis through “Utopedia,” creating participatory legitimacy and preventing premature lock-in of suboptimal futures.
Hybrid Market and Children’s Movement: Sketches long-term institutional designs—a market system that internalizes all externalities and redistributes value creation, and a global child-development initiative to cultivate epistemically and ethically mature citizens—both framed as foundational viatopian infrastructure.
Meta-lesson: Across interventions, the post stresses compounding feedback loops, scalable infrastructure, and moral reflection as essential features of a world capable of guiding itself toward better futures.
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Executive summary: This post outlines a shortlist of high-leverage “Viatopia” interventions—practical projects to move humanity toward Will MacAskill’s vision of a world able to steer itself toward near-best futures—ranging from AI-assisted research infrastructure and reflective governance systems to value-shaping educational and economic institutions. Written as part of the Essays on Longtermism competition, it bridges philosophical longtermism and implementable field-building, offering concrete blueprints for action while emphasizing epistemic humility about the author’s AI-assisted writing process.
Key points:
Purpose and framing: The essay translates the theoretical concept of Viatopia into actionable interventions, aiming to fill the gap between longtermist philosophy and practical implementation infrastructure.
Meta-infrastructure focus: Early interventions prioritize research automation, coordination mechanisms, and field-building institutions that compound effectiveness—such as fellowships, research registries, and incubators for Better Futures and Deep Reflection projects.
Crux platform: Proposes Crux, an AI-assisted platform for systematically mapping and sharing crucial considerations across the longtermist community, incentivizing clarity, calibration, and rapid collective learning.
Human-AI symbiosis: Introduces a framework for differentially accelerating human wisdom, wellbeing, and agency alongside AI progress, preventing loss of human relevance while leveraging AI for moral and strategic enhancement.
Automated macrostrategy: Advocates for AI-enabled workflows to scale strategic reasoning and manage the “multiplicative crucial considerations” problem, building automation infrastructure before transformative AI arrives.
The Good World Project: Describes large-scale AI-mediated elicitation of public visions for the future and synthesis through “Utopedia,” creating participatory legitimacy and preventing premature lock-in of suboptimal futures.
Hybrid Market and Children’s Movement: Sketches long-term institutional designs—a market system that internalizes all externalities and redistributes value creation, and a global child-development initiative to cultivate epistemically and ethically mature citizens—both framed as foundational viatopian infrastructure.
Meta-lesson: Across interventions, the post stresses compounding feedback loops, scalable infrastructure, and moral reflection as essential features of a world capable of guiding itself toward better futures.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.