A path from Effective Altruism (EA) to Second Renaissance via AI risk and collective action problems.
This is a sketch I did a few weeks ago to illustrate how I think people interested in AI risk, especially in the effective altruism community, may journey towards Second Renaissance type thinking (and Pragmatic Utopian / Integral Altruism)
@rufuspollock I love how clearly this sketches a journey from Effective Altruism to a much deeper Second Renaissance. What I find especially compelling is how it reveals the natural broadening of concern from technical control problems to cultural and even spiritual transformation. At the same time, I wonder how we might widen the scope of the map even further, by bringing in some layers that sit outside the current framing but are crucial to making the vision real.
For instance:
And crucially: Who gets to walk this path?
Many steps on the path from AI risk to inner development rely on digital access, cultural capital, and economic stability, resources billions lack. To make the Second Renaissance truly global, we must address this digital and infrastructural exclusion. Rather than a single path, we may need to cultivate an ecology of transformations diverse, locally rooted, and inclusive of many ways of knowing and participating.
Curious to hear your thoughts, and others’, on how we make that path visible and walkable for more of the world.
Absolutely. This “systems” stuff for me is, of course, in there and you can only really address it / do it once you solve collective action problem.
Isn’t that a major part of the cultural evolution and inner development piece? (actually doing it - i realize one could read the cultural evolution section as discovering the idea of that … so maybe important to emphasize that this is not just about ideas but doing / embodying them).
Great point and lovely language. This again is a big part of the inner development I would imagine.
A very good question - and one that merits its own thread(s). I’m a reluctant vanguardist in the sense that for whatever (and often unfair) reasons the capacities to discover and engage in this work is often limited – not just by resources, I emphasize, though that often plays a significant role. This does not downplay the fact that we should be doing everything possible to include as many people as possible in the process – and this is certainly in no way suggests western or global north focus (as just one example a pioneering effort in this whole area is Sarvodaya who are based in Sri Lanka
More on this in a separate thread (which i invite you to boot 
)
I love this and think it’s beautifully clear. I wonder if one possibility to improve or broaden it would be to bring out how so many of the cause areas effective altruists care about, whether it’s AI risk, or nuclear, or pandemic risk, can be seen to bottom out in coordination problems - so that this path doesn’t depend on the specifics of the AI risk route, or indeed on whether you’re more of a longtermist EA or more focused on near-term issues like global poverty. So it’s really a diagram that starts with caring about utils/x-risk/global catastrophic risk in general, then widens in the middle to numerous specific cause areas, and then narrows again to the metacrisis root cause.
Next week I’ve got a call scheduled with Richard Flyer, one of the leading Western exponents of Sarvodaya.
I’ve been following Richard’s work for a couple years now and trying to figure out how to seed some local version. That figuring out process was described in a recent post in the Template for starting and listing local groups (just as we have for tents) thread. Richard personally has a deep mystical core (nothing anyone is likely to replicate by way of practice), so I’ve been sniffing around for the spiritual preconditions of Sarvodaya-analogous community organizing, transportable to the urban West. Work in progress …
