What sort of post-superintelligence society should we aim for?

Great post, here are three reactions:

1.  Markets as viatopia.

You say that "Without a positive vision, we risk defaulting to whatever emerges from market and geopolitical dynamics, with little reason to think that the result will be anywhere close to as good as it could be."

In fact, I think markets are potentially the best pathway for viatopia. The fundamental theorems of welfare economics suggest that without market failures, market dynamics will produce outcomes that maximize social welfare. One route to the best superintelligent future is simply to avoid market concentration (more than one superintelligence), and have governments impose Pigouvian taxes on externalities, the end. Then all of the interesting work is in designing anti-trust and tax measures that are robust to superintelligence. No easy task, but at least it is well-defined. Here, one more general question is whether superintelligence would destroy any of the fundamental conditions that allow markets to maximize social welfare. 

I think of this market-based approach as a version of viatopia as opposed to "utopia" in the narrow sense you defined. The point of markets is that rather than trying to define and control the best future directly, we allow that future to emerge through the market. 

2. Evolutionary mechanisms for viatopia.

Your post doesn't emphasize evolutionary perspectives on viatopia. One strategy could be to ensure diversity across civilizational types, along with mutation mechanisms, and try to create selection mechanisms which correlate fitness with welfare. In that case, we can expect welfare to increase in the long run. 

3. To promote viatopia, you focus on a series of societal primary goods. But these primary goods are plausibly also the focus of protopian efforts. What are some examples where protopianism and viatopianism recommend different actions? 

• Cultivating people's ability and motivation to reflect on their values.
• Structuring collective deliberations so that better arguments and ideas win out over time.

Problems with this:

1. People disagree strongly about which arguments and ideas are better than others.
2. The vast majority of people seem to lack both the hardware (raw cognitive capacity) and software (a reasonable philosophical tradition) to reflect on their values in a positive way.
3. AI seems likely to make things worse or not sufficiently better, for these reasons.

Solving these problems seem to require (at least) some kind of breakthrough in metaphilosophy, such that we have a solution for what is actually the right way to reflect/deliberate about philosophical topics like values, and the solution is so convincing that everyone ends up agreeing with it. But I would love to know if you (or anyone else) have other ideas for solving or getting around these problems for building a viable Viatopia.

Another problem is that morality/values is in large part a status game, but talking about status is generally bad for one's status (who wants to admit that they're espousing some morality/values to win a status game) so this important aspect of morality/values is generally ignored for structural reasons that may be unfixable regardless of other technical and philosophical advances.

It seems like the wrong framing to talk about a "positive vision" for the transition to superintelligence, if that transition involves immense risks and is generally a bad idea. If you think the transition could be “on a par with the evolution of Homo sapiens, or of life itself” but compressed into years, then that surely involves immense risks (of very diverse kinds!). 

From what I've heard you say elsewhere, I think you basically agree with this. But then, surely you must agree that the priority is to delay this process until we can make sure it's safe and well-controlled. And if you are going to talk about positive visions, then I would say it's really important that such visions come with an explicit disclaimer that they are talking about a future we should be actively trying to avoid. I'm afraid that otherwise these articles might give people the wrong idea.

Edit: to make my point clearer, I think a good analogy would be to think of yourself right before the development of nuclear power (including the nuclear bomb). Suppose other people are already talking about the risks, and it seems it's likely to happen so maybe it's worth thinking about how we can make a good future with nuclear. Ok. But given the risks (and that many people still aren't aware of them), talking about a good nuclear future without flagging that the best course of action would be to delay developing this technology until we're sure we can avoid catastrophe seems like a potential infohazard.

Also, I notice no references to anything about the concentration of power or wealth here. Isn't that probably something we want to avoid if we want to reach a good destination, at least all things being equal?  

Even if we are bad at answering the "what would utopia look like" question, what's the reason to think we'd be any better answering the "what would viatopia look like" question? If we are just as bad or worse at answering the second question, it's either useless or actively counterproductive to switch from utopian to viatopian planning. 

Hey Will, very excited to see you posting more on viatopia, couldn't agree more that some conception of viatopia might be an ideal north star for navigating the intelligence explosion.

As crazy as this seems, I just last night wrote a draft of a piece on what I have been calling primary and secondary cruxes/crucial considerations, (in previous work I also used a perhaps even more closely related concept of “robust viatopia proxy targets”) which seems closely related to your "societal version of Rawls' primary goods," though I had not been previously aware of this work by Rawls. I continue to be quite literally shocked at the convergence of our research, in this case profoundly (if you happen to be as incredulous as I am, I do by chance have my work on this time-stamped through a few separate modalities I’d be happy to share.)

I believe figuring out primary goods and primary cruxes should be a key priority of macrostrategy research, we don't need to figure out everything, we just need to get the right processes and intermediate conditions in order to move us progressively in the right direction. 

I think what is ultimately most important is that we reach a state of what I have been calling “deep reflection”; a state in which we have both comprehensively reflected to determine how to achieve a high value future, and simultaneously are in such a state in which society is likely to act on that knowledge. This is not quite the same as viatopia, as it’s more of an end state that would occur right before we actualize our potential, hence I think it can act as another useful handle as the kind of thing we should hope viatopia is ultimately moving us toward.

I’m really looking forward to seeing more essays in your series!

Executive summary: The author argues that during the transition to superintelligence we should aim not for a fixed utopia or ad-hoc problem solving, but for “viatopia,” an intermediate societal state that preserves optionality, safety, and collective wisdom so humanity can reliably steer toward near-best futures.

Key points:

1. Superintelligence would transform society on a scale comparable to human evolution, yet there is little articulated positive vision for what comes after.
2. The author introduces “viatopia” as a waystation society that is well-positioned to reach excellent futures without committing to a specific final end-state.
3. Viatopia is contrasted with utopianism, which overconfidently specifies ideal end-states, and protopianism or piecemeal engineering, which lacks guidance for prioritization during rapid, high-stakes transitions.
4. A viatopian society would possess “societal primary goods” such as material abundance, scientific and technological capacity, coordination ability, gains from trade, and very low catastrophic risk.
5. It would also preserve optionality, cultivate reflection on values, structure deliberation so better arguments win, and maintain stable institutions that support long-term steering.
6. Formally, the author defines viatopia as a state with very high expected value relative to the best feasible outcomes and very low probability of astronomically bad ones, adaptable across moral frameworks.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

This really resonates. What stood out to me is the shift away from designing a single “ideal” end-state toward building a society that preserves flexibility, agency, and moral choice.

In the context of superintelligent AI, locking ourselves into rigid economic or governance structures too early feels like one of the biggest risks, especially for regions already underrepresented in global decision-making.

A viatopia approach feels more realistic and more ethical, it prioritizes resilience, coordination, and inclusion over premature optimization.

Thanks for sharing this, it’s a conversation we need more of.

Vitalik Buterin's call to "let a thousand societies bloom" seems interesting.

• By embracing empiricism, we address the classic utopia failure mode of a society that works in theory but not in practice.

• Individuals have different preferences about their ideal society, and it seems overly controlling to prevent them from creating that society and joining other volunteers in moving there (within reason, e.g. no creation of catastrophic risks to other societies).

• This could be a good "viatopia" by letting us collect data to inform later decisions. Might be possible to build RCTs into the process somehow. (If you're near-indifferent between two city-states, you could sign up to receive a stipend in order to have your residency determined by coinflip. That forms a dataset about the causal impact of moving to a particular society. Track parameters of interest like your personal happiness or production of important philosophical insights.)

Will MacAskill's "viatopia" concept resonates with me — but I don't think any single framework wins here either.

I suspect the most resilient path forward combines:

1. Mini-topias at small/medium scale — Local experimentation with positive visions. Let a thousand societies bloom. Countries already work this way: part of a whole, never the whole itself.

2. A protopia budget — Resources dedicated to solving the most pressing problems, one by one. Prioritization research (like Coefficient and aligned orgs) helps decide where.

3. Viatopia as shared culture — A collective north star that motivates without dictating the destination.

The hard part is (3). Shared values usually emerge from history, not design. But we've done it before: the UN Charter created alignment without uniformity.

So here's a sketch — principles any org building superintelligence should sign:

• Preserve optionality — no irreversible lock-in
• Distribute power — prevent dangerous concentration
• Maintain reversibility — systems must be correctable
• Protect deliberation — humans must keep the ability to reflect
• Minimize catastrophic risk — no short-term gain justifies existential harm
• Share abundance — benefits widely distributed

Not a utopia. A compass.