“‘AI for societal uplift’ as a path to victory” by Raymond Douglas

The AI tools/epistemics space might provide a route to a sociotechnical victory, where instead of aiming for something like aligned ASI, we aim for making civilization coherent enough to not destroy itself while still keeping anchored to what's good[1].

The core ideas are:

1. Basically nobody actually wants the world to end, so if we do that to ourselves, it will be because somewhere along the way we weren’t good enough at navigating collective action problems, institutional steering, and general epistemics
2. Conversely, there is some (potentially high) threshold of societal epistemics + coordination + institutional steering beyond which we can largely eliminate anthropogenic x-risk, potentially in perpetuity[2]
3. As AI gets more advanced, and therefore more risky, it will also unlock really radical advances in all these areas — genuinely unprecedented levels of coordination and sensible decision making, as well as the potential for narrow research automation in key fields [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 4th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kvZyCJ4qMihiJpfCr/ai-for-societal-uplift-as-a-path-to-victory

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.