Building Cooperative Viatopia: The Case for Longtermist Infrastructure Before AI Builds Everything
Basic Series Explainer:
Introduction to Building Cooperative Viatopia comments on two Essays on Longtermism, arguing concrete infrastructure and institutional mechanisms make expansive longtermism tractable by bridging theory and action.
Why Viatopia is Important draws on my Deep Reflection research to provide the theoretical foundation that make viatopia essential. Viatopia, a concept introduced by Will MacAskill, refers to “a state of the world where society can guide itself towards near-best outcomes.”
Viatopia and Buy-In performs stakeholder mapping for AI labs, governments, and public.
Shortlist of Viatopia Interventions presents dozens of concrete high-leverage interventions.
Hybrid Market (not yet published) explores an economic mechanism for systematically pricing externalities and steering toward good outcomes.
Children's Movement (not yet published) examines transforming child-raising as a high-leverage values intervention.
Comprehensive Series Explainer:
Building Cooperative Viatopia: The Case for Longtermist Infrastructure Before AI Builds Everything
This essay series is my submission to the "Essays on Longtermism" competition. The essays are based on my work on Deep Reflection (a comprehensive process for examining crucial considerations to determine a strategy to achieve the best achievable future), and specifically explore viatopia (MacAskill’s term for an intermediate societal state that helps humanity converge toward ideal futures while maintaining low existential risk and keeping options open).
Introduction to Building Cooperative Viatopia comments on two essays from the collection: Owen Cotton-Barratt and Rose Hadshar's analysis of longtermist societies, and Hilary Greaves and Christian Tarsney's comparison of minimal versus expansive longtermism. It establishes the cooperative paradigm and argues that the longtermist community needs practical infrastructure, not just theory. This essay provides the conceptual foundation for the concrete mechanisms that follow.
Why Viatopia is Important provides further theoretical foundation from my Deep Reflection work, explaining Will MacAskill's viatopia concept and why it matters. It introduces the multiplicative crucial considerations framework (showing why dozens to hundreds of interacting factors may make comprehensive reflection orders of magnitude more valuable than narrow approaches), the Instrumental commoditization thesis (AI makes implementation trivial while direction becomes everything), and how diversity of viatopia paths helps prevent premature lock-in.
Viatopia and Buy-In performs concrete stakeholder mapping, analyzing what AI labs, governments, and the general public can each do to move us toward viatopia given their different incentives and capabilities. It bridges from theoretical arguments to practical pathways for achieving feasible buy-in from diverse stakeholders.
Shortlist of Viatopia Interventions presents dozens of concrete high-leverage interventions organized by key principles: improving community infrastructure, creating compounding feedback loops, leveraging AI, focusing on values and strategy, and building self-improving institutions. It demonstrates the breadth of practical work needed to move from longtermist theory to implementation.
Hybrid Market (not yet published) explores a comprehensive economic mechanism that systematically prices all positive and negative externalities, creating automatic incentives for value creation while penalizing value destruction. Originally conceived in my 2021 pre-EA work "Ways to Save the World," it demonstrates one possible institutional design for aggregating diverse values while steering society toward better outcomes.
Children's Movement (not yet published) examines how transforming child-raising and education could be among the highest-leverage interventions for value improvement, building strong epistemics and collaborative mindsets from the earliest ages. Also from my 2021 pre-EA work, it represents a human-centric approach to viatopia that maintains human agency while systematically improving humanity's capacity for wisdom.
Together, these essays demonstrate that viatopia is not merely abstract philosophy but something we can work toward through concrete longtermist infrastructure and institutional design. Each essay is fully standalone and can be read independently.