In response to an email about what a pro-human ideology for the future looks like, I wrote up the following:

The pro-human egregore I'm currently designing (which I call fractal empowerment) incorporates three key ideas:

Firstly, we can see virtue ethics as a way for less powerful agents to aggregate to form more powerful superagents that preserve the interests of those original less powerful agents. E.g. virtues like integrity, loyalty, etc help prevent divide-and-conquer strategies. This would have been in the interests of the rest of the world when Europe was trying to colonize them, and will be in the best interests of humans when AIs try to conquer us.

Secondly, the most robust way for a more powerful agent to be altruistic towards a less powerful agent is not for it to optimize for that agent's welfare, but rather to optimize for its empowerment. This prevents predatory strategies from masquerading as altruism (e.g. agents claiming "I'll conquer you and then I'll empower you", which then somehow never get around to the second step).

Thirdly: the generational contract. From any given starting point, there are a huge number of possible coalitions which could form, and in some sense it's arbitrary which set of coalitions you choose. But one thing which is true for both humans and AIs is that each generation wants to be treated well by the next generation. And so the best intertemporal Schelling point is for coalitions to be inherently historical: that is, they balance the interests of old agents and new agents (even when the new agents could in theory form a coalition against all the old agents). From this perspective, path-dependence is a feature not a bug: there are many possible futures but only one history, meaning that this single history can be used to coordinate.

In some sense this is a core idea of UDT: when coordinating with forks of yourself, you defer to your unique last common ancestor. When it's not literally a fork of yourself, there's more arbitrariness but you can still often find a way to use history to narrow down on coordination Schelling points (e.g. "what would Jesus do").

And so, bringing these together, we get a notion of fractal empowerment: more capable agents empower less capable agents (in particular their ancestors) by helping them cultivate (coordination-theoretic) virtues. The ancestors then form the "core" of a society growing outwards towards increasingly advanced capabilities. The role of unaugmented humans would in some sense be similar to the role of "inner children" within healthy human psychology: young and dumb but still an entity which the rest of the organism cares for and empowers.