Nick Hay

Also available on the EA Forum. Preceded By: Encultured AI Pre-planning, Part 2: Providing a Service If you've read to the end of our last post, you maybe have guessed: we’re building a video game! This is gonna be fun :) Our homepage: https://encultured.ai/ Will Encultured save the world? Is this business plan too good to be true? Can you actually save the world by making a video game? Well, no. Encultured on its own will not be enough to make the whole world safe and happy forever, and we'd prefer not to be judged by that criterion. The amount of control over the world that's needed to fully pivot humanity from an unsafe path onto a safe one is, simply put, more control than we're aiming to have. And, that's pretty core to our culture. From our homepage: > Still, we don’t believe our company or products alone will make the difference between a positive future for humanity versus a negative one, and we’re not aiming to have that kind of power over the world. Rather, we’re aiming to take part in a global ecosystem of companies using AI to benefit humanity, by making our products, services, and scientific platform available to other institutions and researchers. Our goal is to play a part in what will be or could be a prosperous civilization. And for us, that means building a successful video game that we can use in valuable ways to help the world in the future! Fun is a pretty good target for us to optimize You might ask: how are we going to optimize for making a fun game and helping the world at the same time? The short answer is that creating a game world in which lots of people are having fun in diverse and interesting ways in fact creates an amazing sandbox for play-testing AI alignment & cooperation. If an experimental new AI enters the game and ruins the fun for everyone — either by overtly wrecking in-game assets, subtly affecting the game culture in ways people don't like, or both — then we're in a good position to say that it probably shou