Beyond Optimization

A cross-post launching a Foresight Institute / Existential Hope series in which writers Ava admires from outside the usual AI conversation are commissioned to answer one question: what future with AI would they actually want? Anchored by Ava's framing — "Goodhart's Law has never been more relevant: optimization becomes dangerous when we no longer know what we're optimizing for" — the piece argues that the age of "sloptimization" is ending, that human flourishing is more than the reduction of suffering, and that the imaginative work of describing futures worth wanting is now overdue.