Vision of the Future
This is where we build our vision of the future, where we answer our governing question: What Future World? As we develop this vision we will stay pragmatic - we will develop a strategy for creating this ideal future vision and a research agenda whenever we feel gaps in knowledge prevent us from improving our vision or strategy. This is a community effort, we encourage you to share your vision of the future and use the feedback form to comment on specific aspects.
Technology Frontier
For a coherent shared vision, we must pick a relevant technology frontier, otherwise one person will be dreaming of a world possible in one year while another of one possible in one hundred years. Ours is a post-work world enabled by ubiquitous, human-level artificial intelligence.
We have reason to believe that developing human-level AI will prove a transformational event in line with the agricultural and industrial revolutions. We define 'human-level' AI as capable of all human capabilities, not simply matching human-level intelligence on a narrow set of tasks, and that the cost of the technology will fall to a point it is cheaper to use AI/robotics than humans for any task. With this frontier, our strategy is equivalent to AI Governance - to ensure that this transformational technology serves humanity and moves us towards our democratically-designed ideal future, and not toward dystopia.
Fulfilment
What's the point? What are we solving for in our ideal future world? Fulfilment is our current best answer (but we will explore this much more). In our post-work future everyone will have the mental bandwidth to spend their time on the activities that give them purpose; on things that use our strengths to gain a feeling of mastery, engage us with others to feel community, and engage us with something bigger than ourselves. Increased mental bandwidth will mean we make better choices, have more ideas, and engage more with reality. It also allows us to focus on living virtuously to achieve feelings of elevation, a large component of fulfilment.
Shared Values
A set of shared values is the optimum point on the tradeoff between autonomy - giving everyone the freedom to act as they like - and community - with strict adherence to a set of rules. It is therefore also a pre-requisite for a global society - a concept that needs further validation but seems likely to be a component of our ideal vision. We can use the following set of values/virtues and related character strengths as a starting point while developing the concept.
Wisdom: • Curiosity • Love of learning • Judgment • Ingenuity • Emotional intelligence • Perspective
Courage: • Valor • Perseverance • Integrity
Humanity: • Kindness • Loving
Justice: • Citizenship • Fairness • Leadership
Temperance: • Self-control • Prudence • Humility
Transcendence: • Appreciation of beauty and excellence • Gratitude • Hope • Spirituality • Forgiveness • Humour • Zest
Justice
We've explored justice - that which is morally right or fair. We have a plan to determine the ideal level of fairness in society in terms of the distribution of income and wealth, and nobody has greater access to fulfilment based on attributes they don't control (i.e., out of luck). Redistribution is an inevitable by-product of the post-work future enabled by AI, and other policies will ensure those with a lower disposition to happiness receive the additional support they need. We will have developed programmable ethics to ensure that the human-level AI integrates into society in a just way.
We update the vision of the future every month. In the meantime, please contribute your vision of the future, and/or share your thoughts if you have any feedback on our vision of the future.
