I think “Machines of Loving Grace” shouldn’t qualify; it deliberately doesn’t address how the problems get solved, it only cheerfully depicts a world after the problems were all solved.
I think for a submission to be valid, it must at least attempt to answer how the alignment problem gets solved and how extreme concentrations of power are avoided.
One way to do this is to require scenarios come with dates attached. What happens in 2027? 2028? etc. That way if they are like “And in 2035, everything is peachy and there’s no more poverty etc.” it’s more obvious to people that there’s a giant plot hole in the story.
I think that maybe “Machines of Loving Grace” shouldn’t qualify for different reasons: it doesn’t really depict a coherent future in a useful level of detail, it instead makes claims about different aspects of life in isolation. My sense is that currently we’re in short supply of utopian visions, even without specifying any viable path of how to get there.
What do you think about adding a flag regarding whether or not an essay discusses the path from now to then, and people can filter based on it?
it deliberately doesn’t address how the problems get solved, it only cheerfully depicts a world after the problems were all solved.
I think for a submission to be valid, it must at least attempt to answer how the alignment problem gets solved and how extreme concentrations of power are avoided
I strongly disagree with this criterion! If a vision of the future tells us compellingly things like “future X is better than future Y (where both X and Y are plausible)” this is very valuable—we can use it to make plans, and our capacity to make plans is rising so it’s OK to presently have ambitions that outstrip our capacity to see them through. I don’t know if Machines of Loving Grace does this, I’m just arguing against your criterion. I do sorta feel like “cure cancer” doesn’t qualify by this criterion, it’s just too implausible that things are going well but we forget to cure cancer.
I don’t mean to say it isn’t additionally valuable to have plans (which should probably mostly be of the form “solve A, punt B”), but that it isn’t necessary to have them.
I think “Machines of Loving Grace” shouldn’t qualify; it deliberately doesn’t address how the problems get solved, it only cheerfully depicts a world after the problems were all solved.
I think for a submission to be valid, it must at least attempt to answer how the alignment problem gets solved and how extreme concentrations of power are avoided.
One way to do this is to require scenarios come with dates attached. What happens in 2027? 2028? etc. That way if they are like “And in 2035, everything is peachy and there’s no more poverty etc.” it’s more obvious to people that there’s a giant plot hole in the story.
I think that maybe “Machines of Loving Grace” shouldn’t qualify for different reasons: it doesn’t really depict a coherent future in a useful level of detail, it instead makes claims about different aspects of life in isolation. My sense is that currently we’re in short supply of utopian visions, even without specifying any viable path of how to get there.
What do you think about adding a flag regarding whether or not an essay discusses the path from now to then, and people can filter based on it?
Sure that works.
I strongly disagree with this criterion! If a vision of the future tells us compellingly things like “future X is better than future Y (where both X and Y are plausible)” this is very valuable—we can use it to make plans, and our capacity to make plans is rising so it’s OK to presently have ambitions that outstrip our capacity to see them through. I don’t know if Machines of Loving Grace does this, I’m just arguing against your criterion. I do sorta feel like “cure cancer” doesn’t qualify by this criterion, it’s just too implausible that things are going well but we forget to cure cancer.
I don’t mean to say it isn’t additionally valuable to have plans (which should probably mostly be of the form “solve A, punt B”), but that it isn’t necessary to have them.