Creating an Optimal Future. It sounds very arrogant when I type it out. A more reasonable claim would be that it is possible to create a Less Wrong Future, but for reasons that will shortly become apparent that felt like stepping too hard on other people’s shoes. I suppose Working Towards an Optimal Future would be the best title for what I have in mind.

Let me backtrack and start at the beginning. I am not a rationalist. Well, I am not a rationalist as the term applies in this community. Not completely anyway. I have only read some of the Sequences and, although I’ve devoured HPMOR, I do understand and agree with a number of the criticisms that have been leveled toward it.

But I am here because of that Optimal Future I have mentioned. The way I see it, we are not currently on a trajectory that will lead to an optimal future and I am fairly confident that you agree with me on that. From what I have seen and heard from various online communities over the years, quite a few people do agree with me on that.

But the problem is, a few thousand people visit Less Wrong regularly, generating and evolving a unique memescape. And a few miles down the information highway, another few thousand people post to Humanity+ mailing lists; building up a different memescape. There is some overlap, naturally, but not nearly enough. And in another corner of the internet, environmentalist factions sit in their own forums and discuss a different set of problems affecting (trans)humanity’s future. In yet another corner, socialists imagine utopias built on free access to nanofabricators (while anarchists imagine a similar utopia sans the government).

All in all, there may be near to a million people looking at future problems and solutions. But as long as they do so in small fringe groups, the solutions they can think up are limited. Worse, “junk” memes start sweeping into the community, harming recruitment and giving the underlying philosophies a bad name. To push the metaphor about as far as it can go: these communities tend to get a bit inbred over time.

And a million voices fail to affect policies in any way, because for all the hopes and fears they share they fail to coordinate and collaborate. Meanwhile, the world continues to move along a sub-optimal trajectory.

Which, finally, leads us back to Optimal Future. In discussing the problems above with friends, we hit upon an obvious solution: build a place where all futurists and people who care about the future (but do not self identify as futurist) can discuss the relevant topics and hopefully find novel solutions through combining memes that one wouldn’t normally think to combine.

Which is why I am here now. The site has been built, but then that was always going to be the easiest part. The hard part is building a diverse and active community. That’s where you come in. LessWrong is one of the most active future thinking communities on the web, and also a fairly controversial one. Having you as part of the community could make a lot of difference to us. In exchange we can offer you a wider audience and some new perspectives.

So if you are curious as to how a Friendly AGI designed by anarchist would be different to one designed by Greens, feel like scaring communists with what horrors a corporate paperclip maximizer could commit, want to see how wide the spectrum of transhumanists really is, want to learn about cryptography or sousveillance, or feel like debating the pros and cons of open sourced AIs, come on down to optimalfuture.org and take a look at the bigger picture.

http://optimalfuture.org/