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We’ve recently published a set of design sketches for tools for strategic awareness.
We think that near-term AI could help a wide variety of actors to have a more grounded and accurate perspective on their situation, and that this could be quite important:
Tools for strategic awareness could make individuals more epistemically empowered and better able to make decisions in their own best interests.
Better strategic awareness could help humanity to handle some of the big challenges that are heading towards us as we transition to more advanced AI systems.
We’re excited for people to build tools that help this happen, and hope that our design sketches will make this area more concrete, and inspire people to get started.
The (overly-)specific technologies we sketch out are:
Ambient superforecasting — When people want to know something about the future, they can run a query like a Google search, and get back a superforecaster-level assessment of likelihoods.
Scenario planning on tap — People can easily explore the likely implications of possible courses of actions, summoning up coherent grounded narratives about possible futures, and diving seamlessly into analysis of the implications of different hypotheticals.
Automated OSINT — Everyone has instant access to professional-grade political analysis; when someone does something self-serving, this will be transparent.
If you have ideas for how to implement these technologies, issues we may not have spotted, or visions for other tools in this space, we’d love to hear them.
This article was created by Forethought. Read the full article on our website.
This post is part of a sequence. Previous post: Design sketches for angels-on-the shoulder
Your idea for “angels-on-the-shoulder” as part of the epistemic stack addresses a critical legibility requirement for any information system. Power users may dive into adjacent information and consolidate understanding with reference material, but the vast majority of users will be passive, not active. Even power users are likely to be active only in domains where they believe they have outsized insight, and only when they have time to devote to doing epistemic work. Have you considered what the incentive structure looks like for the power users who do the epistemic work that passive users rely on? The angels need to eat.