Design sketches for a more sensible world

This article was created by Forethought. See the original on our website.

Introduction

We don’t think that humanity knows what it’s doing when it comes to AI progress. More and more people are working on developing better systems and trying to understand what their impacts will be — but our foresight is just very limited, and things are getting faster and faster.

Imagine a world where this continues to be the state of play. We fumble our way to creating the most important technology humanity will ever create, an epoch defining technology, and we’re basically making it up as we go along. Of course, this might pan out OK (after all, in the past we’ve often muddled through), but facing the challenges advanced AI will bring without a good idea of what’s actually going on makes us feel… nervous. It’s a bit like arriving in your space ship on a totally unknown planet, and deciding you’ll just release the airlock and step outside to see what it’s like. There might be air on this planet — or you might asphyxiate or immediately catch a lethal alien pathogen.

If you survive, it’s because you were lucky, not because you were wise.

Now imagine a more sensible world. In this world, we get our act together. We realise how clueless we are, and that this is a huge risk factor — so we set about creating and harnessing tools, using AI as a building block, to help us to reason and coordinate through the transition.

Seamless tech helps us to track where claims come from and how reliable they are. Highly customised tools help individuals to understand themselves better and make decisions they endorse. We vastly uplift forecasting and scenario planning, massively improving our strategic awareness, and democratizing access to this kind of information. Coordination tools help large groups to get on the same page. Privacy-preserving assurance tech helps people trust agreements that are currently unenforceable, and negotiation assistance helps us find win-win deals and avoid the outcomes nobody wants.

There’s certainly still a lot of room for things to go wrong in this more sensible world. There might still be very deep value disagreements, and progress could still be very fast. But we’d be in a much better position to notice and address these issues. To a much greater extent, we’d be navigating the transition to even more radical futures with our eyes open, able to make informed choices that actually serve our interests. The challenges might still prove insurmountable! — but because that’s the nature of reality, not because of unforced errors or lack of awareness.

We think that a more sensible world should be achievable, soon — and that more should be done to help us get there.

This series of design sketches tries to envision more concretely how near-term AI systems could transform our ability to reason and coordinate. We’re hoping that these sketches will:

• Help people imagine what this sort of tech might look like, what the world would look like in consequence, and how big a deal that could be

• Encourage builders and makers to push ahead on directions inspired by these technologies

Of course these are just early sketches! We expect the actual technologies that make most sense could in some cases look quite different. But we hope that by being concrete we can help to kickstart more of the visioning process.

Below is an overview of all the technologies we cover in the series, grouped into some loose clusters.¹

Collective epistemics

Tools for collective epistemics make it easy to know what’s trustworthy and reward honesty.

The technologies we discuss are:

• Community notes for everything so that content that may be misleading comes served with context that a large proportion of readers find helpful

• Rhetoric highlighting which automatically flags sentences which are persuasive-but-misleading, or which misrepresent cited work

• Reliability tracking which allows users to effortlessly discover the track record of statements on a given topic from a given actor; those with bad records come with health warnings

• Epistemic virtue evals so that people can compare state-of-the-art AI systems to find the ones that most reliably avoid bias, sycophancy, and manipulation

• Provenance tracing which allows anyone seeing data / claims to instantly bring up details of where they came from, how robust they are, etc.

Angels-on-the-shoulder

‘Angels-on-the-shoulder’ are customised tools that help people make better decisions in real time, narrowing the gap between how well people could make decisions, and how well they actually do.

The technologies we discuss are:

• Aligned recommender systems which optimise for long-term user endorsement rather than short-term engagement

• Personalised learning systems which tailor content to a specific person’s needs and interests and intersperse it through their regular activities

• Automated deep briefings which work as an executive assistant to make sure that people have the relevant facts prepared for them for the decisions they’re facing

• Reflection scaffolding which acts as a Socratic coach, helping people to navigate tricky situations and understand themselves better

• Guardian angels which run in the background and flag in real time when someone’s about to do something they might regret

Tools for strategic awareness

Tools for strategic awareness deepen people’s understanding of what’s actually going on around them, making it easier for them to make good decisions in their own interests.

The technologies we discuss are:

• Ambient superforecasting which allows people to run a query like a Google search, and get back a superforecaster-level assessment of likelihoods

• Scenario planning on tap so that people can explore the likely implications of possible courses of actions and get analysis of the implications of different hypotheticals

• Automated OSINT which gives people access to much higher quality information about the state of the world

Coordination tech

Coordination tech makes it faster and cheaper for groups to stay synced, resolve disagreements, identify coalitions, or negotiate to find win-win deals.

The technologies we discuss are:

• Fast facilitation which enables groups to quickly surface key points of consensus and disagreement, and make decisions everyone can live with

• Automated negotiation which discovers complicated bargains in minutes via automated negotiation on behalf of each party, mediated by trusted neutral systems which can find agreements based on confidential information

• Magic network connects people who should know each other (perhaps even before they know to go looking), enabling mutually beneficial trade, coalition building and more

Assurance and privacy

Assurance and privacy tech allow people to verifiably share information with trusted intermediaries without disclosing it more broadly, or otherwise have greater trust in external processes. This can unlock deals and levels of transparency which are currently out of reach.

The technologies we discuss are:

• Arbitrarily easy arbitration which acts as a fast, cheap and neutral adjudicator of disputes

• Confidential monitoring and verification systems which act as trusted intermediaries, enabling actors to make deals that require sharing highly sensitive information, without disclosing the information directly

• Structured transparency for democratic accountability, allowing people to hold institutions to account in a fine-grained way, without compromising sensitive information

This article was created by Forethought. See the original on our website.

1. A few caveats:

• We haven’t prioritised them

• We’re probably missing good ideas and including some that aren’t great

• The boundaries between clusters and between technologies are fuzzy, and we haven’t invested in them too much

• We’ve tried to lean into overly-specific versions of the tech, in the spirit of concreteness