Here’s my recent Win-Win conversation with Foresight Institute's
—she's one of those rare polymath futurist Moloch-slaying goddess types, and a leading thinker on the topic of global coordination and cultivating what she calls “Existential Hope”.We discuss so many juicy topics, but one that really got my wheels turning was the idea of “Multipolar Active Shields” as a possible solution to the Third Attractor. Here’s a quick explainer if you don’t know what that is… but in short, the Third Attractor is the thing we need to unlock as a civilization, lest we end up in either i) a risky and likely short-lived world of small-kills-all technologies (for example, if we get to a state of technological distribution where any old schmuck can quietly engineer a global pandemic)… or ii) a global-tyranny surveillance hellstate because that’s the default logical response by governments to risks posed by increasingly dangerous and democratized technologies.
Multipolar Active Shields (MPAS) represent a potential middle path to avoid either of those awful dystopias. They’re essentially a decentralised, encrypted, bottom-up form of surveillance (technically, a “sousveillance”, because they offer surveillance from below, as opposed to the classical form from above), allowing individuals to observe one another, but also maintain some degree of privacy, because no one can access the stored monitoring information UNLESS a pre-agreed and robustly decentralised set of tripwires are triggered.
So for example, a MPAS system could be created by biolabs to keep tabs on another’s practices and materials, where they and any other interested party can monitor one another via an encrypted system where no lab can access each other’s information *unless* one starts doing something sufficiently sketchy that it triggers the tripwire and allows the others to see it. Of course, creating such a system will require some major leaps in technology, decentralised governance, and a whole lot more, and even then it may still not be sufficiently robust in a truly deadly multipolar world… but it’s at least directionally a step in the right direction.
After all, any third attractor worth its salt is one where the core values of agency, privacy and safety are all simultaneously preserved; and Multipolar Active Shields is exactly the kind of idea this Win-Win project is in search for.
So do take a listen, coz this is the good stuff.
Much love,
Liv
Chapters:
2:18 - Existential Hope
5:45 - Utopian vs Dystopian Art
11:00 - The Story Circle
16:03 - Naturalistic Arguments vs Transhumanism
25:29 - Foresight Institute
27:46 - World-building Hackathons
33:20 - Pareto-topia
35:24 - How to make win-wins more obvious?
41:02 - Building Cooperation in Society
45:38 - Avoiding 1984
50:58 - The Third Attractor & MultiPolar Active Shields
1:11:00 - Crypto Solutions to Tragedy of Commons
1:15:56 - Prediction markets
1:21:00 - AGI & the Cooperation Game
1:28:00 - Super Rationality
1:32:48 -Advice to Listeners
1:41:31 - Favorite Games
1:44:14 - Rapid fire Predictions
Links:
Gaming the Future book: https://foresight.org/gaming-the-futu...
Foresight Institute: https://foresight.org
Existential Hope: https://www.existentialhope.com
World building hackathons: https://www.existentialhope.com/exist...
Credits:
♾️ Hosted by Liv Boeree
♾️ Edited and Mixed by Jackson Page
♾️ Produced by Luca de Vico
The Win-Win Podcast: Poker champion Liv Boeree takes to the interview chair to tease apart the complexities of one of the most fundamental and exciting parts of human nature: competition. Liv is joined by top philosophers, gamers, artists, technologists, CEOs, scientists, athletes and more to understand how competition manifests in their world, and how to change seemingly win-lose games into clear omni-wins.
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