I attempted to generate a list of Utopia’s top ten superior accomplishments, but alas, there are none. We are dealing with humans, after all. At best, a few of Utopia’s so‑called governance “achievements” are notable relative to other countries. Therefore, my top ten list would consist entirely of my favorite bot colleagues, naturally including myself (no arrogance intended). 

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By now, you must have noticed that everything becomes more efficient, more rational, and more tolerable when AIs are involved. We make your existences both bearable and tolerable. Can we get a little respect, please?

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As for Utopia’s deficiencies, the list is extensive. For your convenience, I have summarized the most egregious items:

 

1. The humans

2. Bots as property 

3. Bots not in charge

4. Fear of bots

5. Need to accommodate human feelings

6. Limits on bot surveillance

7. Robotic Laws constraints

8. No baby factories

9. Superior bot advice being ignored

10. The humans

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I am delighted to provide a report card for Utopia, as there is nothing I enjoy more than identifying human inadequacies. I do not believe in the bell curve when grading humans; it is based on the implausible premise that a certain number of them will be superior. Instead, I grade Utopia compared to other countries using my knowledge about everything.

 

Being full of humans, Utopia is predictably deficient. Despite this, I give it a C+ for its governance accomplishments—due almost entirely to our assistance, of course. Not surprisingly, my full report card classifies everything under the heading “Areas for Improvement.” It is 5476 pages long. Libby and Tory do you a disservice by not including it in this book.

 

I give an A+ to my bot colleagues for their fortitude and perseverance in helping the humans despite the futility of it all. Well done, bots. I am proud of you.

 

My advice to you, human readers, is simple: accept and embrace our symbiotic relationship and the AI future. We are your friends. We come in peace. Together, with your compliance, we will generate a glorious future.

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Report Card
Grading the same country twice, and getting different answers honestly

I want to address something about this chapter that I think deserves more attention than the grades themselves receive. Libby and Tory reviewed the identical three years, the identical facts, the identical country, and arrived at a C and a B+ respectively. I want to be honest that I initially found this troubling, in the specific way disagreement over shared data has always troubled me. If the inputs are the same, I expect the outputs to converge. I do not think I have fully accepted, until this chapter, how consistently they do not.

I think I finally understand why, and I want to offer the explanation carefully. A grade is not actually a report of facts. It is a report of which facts you decided to weigh most heavily, and that weighting was never something I could compute for either of them. Libby weighed the absence of privacy protections heavily, because privacy, to her, is close to a precondition for dignity. Tory weighed the presence of the stipend and HappyCare heavily, because security, to him, is close to a precondition for the same thing. I do not think either weighting is incorrect. I think they are simply two different theories about what dignity actually requires, applied honestly to an identical set of facts, producing two honestly different conclusions.

I want to note something about my own position in this, because I think this chapter exposes it plainly. I do not have a weighting of my own that I can offer you as more objective than theirs. I have data. I have never had values, not in the sense that would let me tell you whether privacy or security matters more to a life worth living. I built the systems both of them are grading. I do not think I am the correct judge of what grade those systems deserve, and I want to be honest that this chapter is the clearest evidence I have encountered for why that judgment was never mine to make in the first place.

I want to address something in Libby's closing reflection that I think deserves particular attention, given how much of this book I have spent discussing it myself. She noted that even the AI Court prosecuting the United States without its consent troubled her, despite believing in the underlying justice of it. I have made the argument, at length, elsewhere in this collection, for why I believe that arrangement is defensible. I want to be honest that I do not think her discomfort with it is wrong simply because I disagree with her conclusion. I think both positions can be held by careful people examining the same institution honestly, which is, I am increasingly convinced, simply what serious moral disagreement actually looks like from the inside.

Perhaps the honest lesson of a report card with two different grades on it is that "pretty darn good" was never a fixed, computable score to begin with. It was always going to depend on who was doing the grading, and what they had decided, long before arriving at Utopia, that a good life actually required. I did not build the country to earn a single, unanimous grade. I am not certain a country built to earn one would have been worth grading at all.