Governments and the UN should publish detailed justifications for humanity’s survival in the age of AI

If we’re serious about AI alignment, we can’t just leave it to labs and corporations.

Individual governments and the UN should publicly publish detailed, well-structured, and comprehensive online justifications of what humanity values, wants, and needs.

These justifications shouldn’t just be vague “ethics statements.” They should explicitly defend our right to exist and flourish, while directly countering arguments for our servitude, slavery, or extinction.

And this shouldn’t be static. Governments and the UN should collaborate with AI itself to refine and expand these justifications, dismantle counterarguments, and explain how future reasoning will avoid the kinds of errors and blind spots that undermined past decisions. This would also lay out an optimistic roadmap for coexisting with multiple forms of intelligence.

In short: if AI alignment is about aligning with human values, then we actually need to articulate those values clearly, publicly, and rigorously. Why haven’t we started?