Aligning to the social contract — SR2025 Agenda Snapshot

One-sentence summary: Generate AIs’ operational values from ‘social contract’-style ideal civic deliberation formalisms and their consequent rulesets for civic actors

Theory of Change

Formalize and apply the liberal tradition’s project of defining civic principles separable from the substantive good, aligning our AIs to civic principles that bypass fragile utility-learning and intractable utility-calculation

Broad Approach

cognitive

Target Case

mixed

Orthodox Problems Addressed

Value is fragile and hard to specify, Goals misgeneralize out of distribution, Instrumental convergence, Humanlike minds/goals are not necessarily safe, Fair, sane pivotal processes

Key People

Gillian Hadfield, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Sydney Levine, Matija Franklin, Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Funding

Deepmind, Macroscopic Ventures

Estimated FTEs: 5 - 10

See Also

aligning-to-context, aligning-what

Outputs in 2025

8 item(s) in the review. See the wiki/summaries/ entries with frontmatter agenda: aligning-to-the-social-contract (these were generated alongside this file from the same export).

Source

• Row in shallow-review-2025/agendas.csv (name = Aligning to the social contract) — Shallow Review of Technical AI Safety 2025.

Related Pages

• ai-safety
• ai-safety
• aligning-to-context
• aligning-what
• aligned-to-who
• theory-for-aligning-multiple-ais
• tools-for-aligning-multiple-ais

Sources cited

Primary URLs harvested from this page’s summary references. Auto-generated by scripts/backfill_citations.py; edit by re-running, not by hand.

• Summary: AI Safety (Wikipedia) — referenced as [[ai-safety]]