One thing I noticed is that there is an interesting analogy between your model and a fairly standard model in economics where society consists of a representative agent in each time period (representing something like a generation, but without overlap) each trying to maximise its own utility. They can plan based on the utilities of subsequent generations (e.g. predicting that the next generation will undo this generation’s policies on some topic) but they don’t inherently value those utilities. This is then understood via the perspective of a planner who wants to maximise the (discounted) sum of future utilities, even though each agent in the model is only trying to maximise their own utility.
This framework is rich enough to exhibit various inter-generational policy challenges, such as an intergenerational prisoner’s dilemma where you can defect or cooperate on the following generation or the possibility of the desire of a generation to tie the hands of future generations or even the desire to stop future generations tying the hands of generations that follow them.
Indeed this seems related! We’d hope that there isn’t too much conflict between the different “generations”, since the intent is for the overseer to enable long-term plans, but it seems like something that could happen if the overseer is bad enough.
Thanks — this looks promising.
One thing I noticed is that there is an interesting analogy between your model and a fairly standard model in economics where society consists of a representative agent in each time period (representing something like a generation, but without overlap) each trying to maximise its own utility. They can plan based on the utilities of subsequent generations (e.g. predicting that the next generation will undo this generation’s policies on some topic) but they don’t inherently value those utilities. This is then understood via the perspective of a planner who wants to maximise the (discounted) sum of future utilities, even though each agent in the model is only trying to maximise their own utility.
This framework is rich enough to exhibit various inter-generational policy challenges, such as an intergenerational prisoner’s dilemma where you can defect or cooperate on the following generation or the possibility of the desire of a generation to tie the hands of future generations or even the desire to stop future generations tying the hands of generations that follow them.
Indeed this seems related! We’d hope that there isn’t too much conflict between the different “generations”, since the intent is for the overseer to enable long-term plans, but it seems like something that could happen if the overseer is bad enough.