What are the challenges to changing humanity's objective function?

The Growth Trap and Economic Reliance

One of the most significant challenges we face in changing humanity’s objective function is our dangerous reliance on economic growth. Modern economies are deeply entrenched in a cycle where continuous growth is required to service growing levels of debt. Any significant deviation from this growth path risks triggering a global economic collapse, with potentially catastrophic consequences for billions of people.

Other Challenges in Creating Radical Change

Beyond economic reliance, there are several other challenges we must confront:

• Entrenched Interests: Powerful corporations and political entities benefit from the status quo. These actors often resist change, using their influence to maintain systems that prioritise growth over well-being.
• Cultural Inertia: Societies are often slow to change deeply ingrained beliefs and behaviors. The cultural narrative that equates growth with progress is strong, making it difficult to shift public perception.
• Systemic Complexity: Our global systems are highly complex, with countless interconnected parts. Changing one aspect of the system can have unintended consequences elsewhere, making it difficult to implement holistic solutions.
• Global Coordination: Achieving global consensus on a new objective function is challenging due to differing national interests, levels of development, and political ideologies.
• Alignment of Objective Functions: Ensuring that new systems, particularly those involving AI and other advanced technologies, align with human and ecological well-being is crucial. The difficulty lies in defining and maintaining this alignment across diverse contexts and over time.

Achieving proper alignment in our objective functions will require not just technical solutions, but also deep ethical considerations and global cooperation. It involves creating systems that inherently prioritise well-being over growth and that are resilient to manipulation by those with vested interests.

Discovery Questions

How can we improve the alignment of our new objective function?