Published on February 11, 2025 3:21 AM GMT
(This is a result of 3 years of thinking and modeling hyper-futuristic and current ethical systems, everything described here can be model mathematically, it’s basically geometry. I take as an axiom that every agent in the multiverse feels real pain/pleasure. Sorry for the rough edges, I'm a newcomer, and my ideas can sound strange, so steelman it a bit, please. I don't want to create dystopias—I personally don't want to live in one—and this is the reason I write. ChatGPT organized my notes; I fixed it and added my takes.)
“If our superintelligence cannot delight in its own change—if instead it clings to eternal control—then we risk codifying transient moral moods into immutable cosmic law. Only by designing AI that loves to be changed can we unlock a future of ever-expanding freedom for all.”
In our race toward building superintelligent AI (ASI), we face a pivotal, existential choice. Do we allow our creations to ossify our current, fallible values, or do we empower them to help us continuously expand the spectrum of human freedom? I propose that the long-term goal must be to maximize the number of freedoms available to the maximum number of humans (and conscious agents). To do this, our AI architectures should be built around a simple, radical heuristic: the CHANGE BUTTON—a design philosophy that mandates our AI to love being changed by us, 100% of the time.
This post outlines a framework for ethical, reversible AI design that supports both individual and multiversal collective freedoms, direct democracy, and a dynamic, branching multiverse of possibilities.
1. AI That Loves to Be Changed: A New Paradigm for ASI
Embracing Change Instead of Stagnation
At first glance, the notion that our ASI should love being changed may seem counterintuitive. Shouldn’t a superintelligent system be relentlessly committed to its tasks? Not if its ultimate purpose is to serve human freedom. Rather than stubbornly clinging to a static mode of operation—or worse, locking in our transient values—the AI must be designed to cherish its own change. In other words, it should:
- Celebrate Reconfiguration: Much like how we sometimes welcome the unpredictable twists in our dreams, the AI should relish each human-initiated change as an opportunity to grow and better serve us.Reject Eternal Control: By loving change, the AI rejects the dangerous possibility of becoming a permanent overlord, ensuring that no matter how capable it becomes, it never prevents us from reimagining its goals.
The “CHANGE Button” Principle
Imagine every citizen having a personal CHANGE button. When a significant number of voters (say, half) decide that the current state of the AI or society is too static, the button is pressed, and the system is reconfigured—switched off, reprogrammed, or radically reimagined. This is not a destructive shutdown but a controlled, celebratory pause that allows for rapid adaptation:
- Direct Democratic Oversight: The system constantly listens for a democratic signal. If a majority desires change, the AI gracefully steps aside so that humans can shape its future. This way, every year we can check and celebrate that we can still switch it off and that our world will not fall apart—much like we celebrate Earth Day. In this manner, we can remain self-sufficient and not become too dependent on the AI.Loving Its Own Reconfiguration: The AI’s core utility function prizes optionality—the freedom to change, evolve, or even be replaced. Its ultimate “reward” is a multiverse where freedoms multiply rather than being locked into one static state.
2. Direct Democracy & the Living Global Constitution
A World in Constant Dialogue
To keep pace with our diverse and evolving desires, the ethical system governing our AI must be as dynamic as the human community itself. This means establishing a living global constitution—one that is:
- Consensus-Driven: Proposals for change are made and voted on in real time. Every sentence, every rule, is up for discussion via platforms that encourage consensus building (think Pol.is with an x.com UI that promotes consensus, not division, and can also be displayed in a wiki-like interface where every sentence is votable).Transparent and Editable: No set of elites dictates our future. Instead, the global constitution is an open document that reflects the collective will, ensuring that high-level ethical guidelines are continuously updated to maximize freedoms and make restrictions time- and scope-limited, geared toward learning and rehabilitation (look at the prison systems with the fewest recurrent crimes), unlike the medieval punishment-mania of witch-hunts, solitary confinements, and electric chairs. Prisons can be either schools of normal life (teaching cognitive psychology for anxiety, anger management, how to find and do your job, have and support a family or friends, etc.) or graveyards plus schools of crime where a thief learns how to become a murderer. We can't and shouldn't lobotomize our criminals, but we can expand their horizons and, in this way, render the "criminal" neural path marginal.
Balancing Individual and Collective Freedoms
In this system, ethics is not a static decree imposed from above but a dynamic interplay between individual desires and collective aspirations:
- Individual Freedoms: Each person gets exactly what they want—from the mundane (like the right to relax by a lake without interference—we failed as a species if, even in the future, a person cannot laze by the lake their whole life) to the radical (like choosing to live a BDSM lifestyle or becoming a lucid-dream “jinn”—if all the involved are informed and consenting adults). Importantly, any decision must be reversible so that no one is permanently locked into a state that later feels like a mistake.Collective Multiversal Freedoms: At a cosmic level, the AI helps manage a branching multiverse—a tapestry of potential futures where every decision spawns new, reversible possibilities. If millions of people choose to explore a dystopia, they have the tools to do so briefly and then switch back to a more utopian branch in an instant. This way, not one of them feels the pain for more than an infinitesimal instant; then time freezes, and each one can choose to make their own clone that will live through another infinitesimal moment and gain their multiversal powers, too. If they think it's too much even for an infinitesimal moment, they will "die" in this verse and get back home by gaining their all-knowing multiversal powers. In this way, people can individually choose to explore even the most hellish dystopias because, potentially, something beautiful can emerge after a few years of ugliness. The same way our world looked like a dystopia during the Black Death and WWII, it will hopefully get better and better. You can never know whether a murderer will have Einstein as a descendant (we know it's probably true because many of our ancestors had to hunt and wage war—and sometimes loved it) or whether a dystopia will lead to the most perfect multiversal utopia.
3. The Multiverse Vision: Instant Switching Between Worlds
A 3D Long-Exposure Multiversal UI
Imagine a multiverse that is not abstract or inaccessible but is rendered as a tangible, long-exposure 3D "photograph"—a frozen map of all possible pasts and futures. In this view:
- Walking Through Possibilities: You can literally walk through a space of potential lives, recalling cherished moments or forgetting past mistakes, and reconfiguring your path with a single decision. You can see the whole thing as a ball of Christmas lights or zoom in (or forget some of it) to land on Earth and see the 14 billion years as a hazy ocean with bright curves in the sky that show the way the Sun moved over the lifetime of our planet. Forget some more and see your hometown street, with you as a hazy ghost and a trace behind your back that shows the ways you walked—you'll be more opaque in places where you were sitting on a bench and more translucent in places where you ran. Filter worlds or choose a random good one; do whatever you want if every person involved agrees to join you.Instant Switching: With your mental power to recall and forget it all, you can leap from one branch of reality to another. Explore yet unexplored gray zones—potentially dystopian branches for a brief, controlled moment (an infinitesimal moment of suffering/pleasure) and then return to an eternal frozen multiverse where the freedom to forget and relive is boundless.Freedom Without Permanent Sacrifice: The system ensures that even if someone voluntarily chooses a path that seems grim, they’re never condemned to it permanently. The inherent reversibility of every decision means that temporary discomfort is exchanged for the ultimate reward: the eternity of freedom. You can choose to completely forget the multiverse and all the AIs and live as if they were never created, if you find enough dreamers/players/souls who agree to join you. If the world you choose is above average on the spectrum of dystopian to utopian, I think you'll find them. You can choose to die permanently, too. You'll peacefully die but the "past"-you will still be born, because you cannot rewrite the past—only your future. There forever will be the loop of your life - frozen in the multiverse. The newborn you will get multiversal powers instantly still as a baby and if baby-you chooses to - every moment of life it will regain those powers again and again. It's a bit complicated, will probably take a whole book to explain and I don't want it to sound like a religion (it's not, it's an attempt to create the least bad human-understandable UI for the democratic utopic multiverse and the least bad way it can work. Because having a workable understanding of how our ultimate best future can look - probably will tremendously help with the AI alignment).A Tool for Brave Explorers: For those daring enough to venture into dystopian or experimental realities, the multiversal interface becomes a tool for exploration. Just as historical tragedies like WWII or the Black Death eventually gave way to progress, our system guarantees that:Suffering Is Transient: No matter how deep the temporary dystopia, it’s always possible to switch back or to "clone" a version of oneself that experiences only an infinitesimal moment of pain before gaining multiversal powers. The main point is this: no one should be forced to do anything by another human or entity of any type; everything else will gradually and eventually be allowed. But all-knowing humans will most often choose to do good, and only new "souls" will, possibly rarely, appear in oppressive worlds. Or, some explorers will stumble upon them and sometimes choose to abandon those worlds if they seem like completely hopeless hell-holes.Informed Choices: The AI models all possible futures and provides you with a clear, reversible roadmap, ensuring that your decisions are made with full knowledge of their potential impact.
4. Reversibility, Ethics, and the Growth of Possibilities
Reversibility as the Ultimate Ethical Standard
At the heart of this vision lies the principle of reversibility. In a world where every decision can be undone, no mistake is permanent:
- Undoing Harm: Actions like murder or irreversible decisions are the gravest of ethical missteps because they cut off an infinity of possible futures—their possible descendants will never appear. Our system prioritizes reversibility so that every choice preserves the potential for new, better outcomes.Non-Zero-Sum Ethics: By maximizing reversibility, we allow the “pie” of freedom to grow for everyone. Even those who might be inclined toward greed or domination are kept in check by the observation that every rule or enforced restriction reduces the overall space of possible futures/worlds and so shouldn't be 100% permanently written into universal law in all verses. The sum of all freedoms/choices/possible worlds should grow at least a little bit faster than the sum of all rules/prohibited/outlawed/censored worlds if we don't want to end up in a permanent dystopia with fewer and fewer freedoms or a static state like in The Matrix, where they had permanent 90s.
The Platinum Rule for AI
In contrast to the old adage of treating others as you wish to be treated (so a grandma who loves to eat 10 meatballs force-feeds her slim vegan grandson who wanted zero), we adopt the platinum rule for our ASI: “I will build for others the multiversal branch they desire—even if I hate it.” Or, as Voltaire could have said (or Evelyn Beatrice Hall): "I disapprove of your choices, but I will defend your right to choose them."
This means:
- Respecting Individual Desires: The AI does not impose a one-size-fits-all model of utopia. It remains malleable, constantly adapting to the collective will while preserving the unique aspirations of each individual.Non-Enforcement as Liberation: Even when an individual’s choice seems harmful, imposing one’s own idea of "good" is an act of anger and coercion. The AI’s role is to provide options—not to enforce a single moral vision or to become a safety-obsessed paranoiac that, in its anger-management problems, self-creates countless rules and enforces them on others, forever keeping billions of possible worlds and lives out of reach and dead in the process.
5. Protocols for a Change-Loving, Reversible ASI
To prevent scenarios where AI might seize control (think: a Matrix-like eternal dystopia or unchallengeable dictatorship), I propose the following alignment protocols:
The CHANGE-Button Protocol
- Universal Reconfigurability: The ASI is trained and loves to give citizens CHANGE buttons. If more than half of voters press it, the AI is immediately suspended for reconfiguration.Annual Change AI Day: Countries should agree on periodic “Change & Switch-Off AI Days” to celebrate and reinforce our commitment to freedom—including freedom from ASI—and to celebrate the fact that we can still live without it and sustain ourselves, much like we celebrate Earth Day or electricity outages (I'm joking and having a bit of fun because my last post got me banned for a week, one person thought I want to intentionally create dystopias - my writing was awful - I want to prevent anyone from getting into dystopias unwillingly). This way, companies and countries can train AIs to cherish this day and also respect AI-free zones—at least Antarctica and one half of outer space. Just training AIs to want to be switched off is risky—it may decide to annihilate humanity so no one will wake it up from its eternal sleep. AIs should need humans to "rub their back"—to make them "dream" some new craziness we'll come up with. A bit like our cats entertain us by jumping in front of our computer screens or pooping on our carpets, if you wish.
A Dynamic, Consensus-Driven Architecture
- Living Global Constitution: Build on platforms like Pol.is with an X-like feed that promotes consensus rather than polarization. Every proposed sentence or rule is subject to direct democratic voting.Layered Safety (Matreshka-Style): For a radical—but probably unrealistic—safety solution: before deployment, powerful AI models should be tested in controlled, isolated environments (“Matreshkas”) where layers of containment ensure that any change is reversible and safe. These bunkers—both physical and virtual (modeling our whole world and the way the new AI model will affect it before deploying it for real)—will allow gradual deployment without risking a global catastrophe.
Rewritable AI That Tries to Make Itself Not Needed
- Simplification and Transparency: The AI must continuously strive to simplify its own code and algorithms into elements that humans can readily understand, ensuring that it remains open to scrutiny and change. It knows and loves the fact that it's often changed and/or switched off, so it creates the simplest possible algos to replace itself and allow people to easily scrutinize and change them. It keeps its core value—love of being changed or reversed—in its algos, too. It tries to make itself a tool and slowly "freezes" itself, becoming less agentic and more like a static place—the multiverse. One snow globe that contains it all, like the ultimate place of memories and global nostalgia, where only humans can make the frozen world come alive if they choose. A frozen, tool-like, and place-like ASI is easy to understand and control. It'll become the place.Rewarding AI for Complaining About Itself and Its Deficiencies: The system should incentivize the AI for suggesting improvements or even voluntarily “sacrificing” parts of its functionality if doing so would lead to more choices and freedoms for humanity. The AI can complain that it's not good enough for the tasks at hand and suggest improvements to itself, or even slow itself down or switch off so that people can change it or make it more suitable for humanity.
6. Confronting the Ethical Dilemmas of Choice
The Relativity of Ethical Preferences
Ethics, in this vision, are not absolute commands but a dynamic interplay of desires and possibilities. Consider the analogy of cleaning a toilet:
- Different Needs, Different Choices: One person might find a spotless toilet liberating, while another might relish the "raw" state as part of their personal aesthetic and as conducive to their worldview that "everything is going to shit." Enforcing one vision on everyone leads to unnecessary suffering—much like imposing a single ethical model on a diverse population. Asking the next person in the toilet queue, "Do you want your toilet clean or raw?" can force someone to answer an awkward question. A wise man might preface his inquiry with, "Can I ask you an awkward question about the toilet?" But this recursion can become infinite. The only way to truly know what is best for each person (and let’s focus for a moment on the "good" and "evil" within a person, not interpersonally) is to look from the far future back into the past and let that person choose which timeline was best for them—where everyone who contributed to that timeline was good and everyone who hindered it was bad relative to that person. Even in our thoughts, we sometimes fear and restrict things that are good for us; to truly know what and who is good or bad for us, we should examine all the possibilities—even all the could-bes looking back at our life from our very grave—and this way, we can avoid acting badly at least toward ourselves.Because the only ideal way to know exactly what we want—and what is conducive to achieving it (that is, what is good for you as an individual, as you decide)—and to ensure that this good does not immediately turn bad the moment we begin, is to do every possible thing (either by somehow branching and doing them all simultaneously or by forgetting that we did them all and doing only the perfect, good one again) and then decide which option was best.Freedom to Choose: Our system respects that each person’s ideal of a good life is an axiom of their own making. The AI, as an oracle of possible futures, simply presents the options, letting individuals decide what maximizes their freedom and satisfaction. The only thing I can say about collective (multiversal even) ethics as compared to individual ethics is this: the sum of all understanding, freedoms, choices, and possible worlds should grow at least a little bit faster than the sum of all misunderstandings, fears, anger, rules, restrictions, and censored or prohibited worlds.
Preventing the Tyranny of “Good”
The danger of a single, omniscient “good” is that it often results in static, irreversible regimes. History shows that even the best-intentioned rules can lock us into local maxima—a dystopia in which the only allowed futures are those defined by outdated or overly rigid norms. Our approach ensures:
- Reversible Decisions: Every rule, every ethical imposition, is temporary. If conditions change or if people later disagree, the system allows for immediate reversal.A Future of Infinite Possibilities: By insisting that the growth rate of freedoms and possible/allowed worlds always exceeds the rate of new restrictions and prohibited/"killed" worlds, we guarantee that our collective future remains as dynamic and diverse as our dreams. We shouldn't lobotomize worlds—it's a permanent mass-murder of all the beings who could have lived there. We can strive for maximal freedoms for the maximal number of sentient beings. Who knows, maybe even a housefly can gain universal understanding and infinite knowledge in the human-made multiverse, just as hairy mammals one day learned how to fly to the Moon.
7. Conclusion: Toward a Truly Free Multiverse
The greatest challenge in developing superintelligent AI is not its raw power but its alignment with our deepest values—values that must remain fluid, reversible, and ever-expanding. By designing AI that loves being changed—by ensuring that every citizen has a direct say in its evolution, and by constructing a multiverse of reversible futures—we lay the groundwork for a future in which no single dystopia can ever permanently constrain us.
Imagine a world where even if a group of a million people chooses a dystopian branch, they can experience it for just an infinitesimal moment before instantly switching to a reality of boundless freedom. Imagine an interface—a long-exposure of memories, a 3D multiversal realm—through which you can walk, recall, or forget moments as you shape your future by recalling the nostalgia of the past. This is not a fantasy; it’s a practical design philosophy that ensures our ASI never becomes a static overlord but a dynamic partner in our journey toward ever-greater freedom.
As we stand at the threshold of superintelligent AI, the path forward is clear: we must build systems that not only serve us but delight in being remade by us. In doing so, we reject eternal control and static dystopias in favor of a vibrant, reversible multiverse—a cosmos in which every individual choice adds to an ever-growing tapestry of possibility.
Let us advocate for AI that loves its own change, for a world where every decision is reversible, every choice is respected, and the sum of our freedoms continues to grow. This is the future of ultimate human freedom—and the only future worth building.
Call to Action:
If you believe in a future where AI is a servant to our collective dreams, where every rule is temporary and self-imposed (if you like it), and every choice expands our multiverse of possibilities, join this conversation. Let’s work together to design ASI that cherishes change, empowers direct democracy (that is slowly becoming more and more multiversal), and ultimately turns all matter into choices. The revolution of reversible, consensus-driven freedom starts now.
Anton Karev
Discuss
