Public Policy and Superintelligent AI: A Vector Field Approach

We consider the speculative prospect of superintelligent AI and its normative implications for governance and global policy. Machine superintelligence would be a transformative development that would present a host of political challenges and opportunities. This paper identifies a set of distinctive features of this hypothetical policy context, from which we derive a correlative set of policy desiderata—considerations that should be given extra weight in long-term AI policy compared to in other policy contexts. Our contribution describes a desiderata “vector field” showing the directional change from a variety of possible normative baselines or policy positions. The focus on directional normative change should make our findings relevant to a wide range of actors, although the development of concrete policy options that meet these abstractly formulated desiderata will require further work.