When we talk of aiming for the good future for humanity – whether by aligning AGI or any other way – it's implicit that there are some futures that "humanity" as a whole would judge as good. That in some (perhaps very approximate) sense, humanity could be viewed as an agent with preferences, and that our aim is to satisfy said preferences.

But is there a theoretical basis for this? Could there be? How would it look like?

Is there a meaningful frame in which humanity be viewed as optimizing for its purported preferences across history?

Is it possible or coherent to imagine a wrapper-mind set to the task of maximizing for the utopia, whose activity we'd actually endorse?

This post aims to sketch out answers to these questions. In the process, it also outlines how my current models of basic value reflection and extrapolation work.

Informal Explanation

Basic Case

Is an utopia that'd be perfect for everyone possible?

The short and obvious answer is no. Our civilization contains omnicidal maniacs and true sadists, whose central preferences are directly at odds with the preferences of most other people. Their happiness is diametrically opposed to other people's.

Less extremely, it's likely that most individuals' absolutely perfect world would fail to perfectly satisfy most others. As a safe example, we could imagine someone who loves pizza, yet really, really hates seafood, to such an extent that they're offended by the mere knowledge that seafood exists somewhere in the world. Their utopia would not have any seafood anywhere – and that would greatly disappoint seafood-lovers. If we now postulate the existence of a pizza-hating seafood-lover... Well, it would seem that their utopias are directly at odds.^[1]

Nevertheless, there are worlds that would make both of them happy enough. A world in which everyone is free to eat food that's tasty according to their preferences, and is never forced to interact with the food they hate. Both people would still dislike the fact that their hated dishes exist somewhere. But as long as food-hating is not their core value that's dominating their entire personality, they'd end up happy enough.

Similarly, it intuitively feels that worlds which are strictly better according to most people's entire arrays of preferences are possible. Empowerment is one way to gesture at it – a world in which each individual is simply given more instrumental resou...

Utopia