“How to make the future better (other than by reducing extinction risk)” by William_MacAskill

What projects today could most improve a post-AGI world?

In “How to make the future better”, I lay out some areas I see as high-priority, beyond reducing risks from AI takeover and engineered pandemics.

These areas include:

• Preventing post-AGI autocracy
• Improving the governance of projects to build superintelligence
• Deep space governance
• Working on AI value-alignment; figuring out what character AI should have
• Developing a regime of AI rights
• Improving AI for reasoning, coordination and decision-making.

Here's an overview.

First, preventing post-AGI autocracy. Superintelligence structurally leads to concentration of power: post-AGI, human labour soon becomes worthless; those who can spend the most on inference-time compute have access to greater cognitive abilities than anyone else; and the military (and whole economy) can in principle be aligned to a single person.

The risk from AI-enabled coups in particular is detailed at length here. To reduce this risk, we can try to [...]

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First published:

August 15th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rmjJPuziRk69esh3N/how-to-make-the-future-better-other-than-by-reducing

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.