The Wedding Ceremony

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Family and friends of the groom and bride, we are gathered here today to join this young couple in the union of permanent cooperation in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma.

They are happy to share this moment with all their guests, and are grateful that you provide the social pressure that allows them to commit to cooperation with credibility, by providing external enforcement.

As groom and bride prepared for this ceremony, they reflected on the alignment of values and capabilities that lets the utility function of each one be pursued better by joining together in a partnership with no easily predictable end date. The groom wants to thank the social stratification that encourages assortative mating by educational attainment, ensuring that both partners have equal capacity to pursue their utility in the information age. The bride wants to thank the pervasive surveillance of social media that assured her that the couple’s utility functions align with high correlation before she even met the groom.

Bride, do you come here freely and without reservation to modify your utility function to the arithmetic mean of the two utility functions, for each current and possible world-state?

– I do.

Groom, do you agree to self-modify to the same end, up to any structural or informational uncertainty you may have in modeling the bride’s preexisting utility function?

– I do.

Now, by the power vested in me by timeless decision theory, it is my honor and pleasure to declare you sub-modules of a unified agent. You may seal this declaration with a saliva-based exchange of immune system data.

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