Will MacAskill’s “viatopia” concept resonates with me — but I don’t think any single framework wins here either.
I suspect the most resilient path forward combines:
1. Mini-topias at small/medium scale — Local experimentation with positive visions. Let a thousand societies bloom. Countries already work this way: part of a whole, never the whole itself.
2. A protopia budget — Resources dedicated to solving the most pressing problems, one by one. Prioritization research (like Coefficient and aligned orgs) helps decide where.
3. Viatopia as shared culture — A collective north star that motivates without dictating the destination.
The hard part is (3). Shared values usually emerge from history, not design. But we’ve done it before: the UN Charter created alignment without uniformity.
So here’s a sketch — principles any org building superintelligence should sign:
Preserve optionality — no irreversible lock-in
Distribute power — prevent dangerous concentration
Maintain reversibility — systems must be correctable
Protect deliberation — humans must keep the ability to reflect
Minimize catastrophic risk — no short-term gain justifies existential harm
Share abundance — benefits widely distributed
Not a utopia. A compass.
Thanks for writing this!
“Their next question is almost always ‘what do you propose to do about this?’ over ‘is this actually a problem?’.” --> I wrote a big post about this :)
LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EexsebbYhbe2gXkPP/the-current-bottleneck-is-political-will-not-research
EA Forum : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nmQpZyybjHrunDxFT/the-current-bottleneck-is-political-will-not-research