Atlas · dilemmas
Twenty cases where the calculus breaks
A dilemma here is not a puzzle with an answer. Each one is a situation where every option honours some axis and violates another, the stakeholders include entities that cannot object, and the outcome is not fully reversible. The court can tell you how the advisors split — that is all it can tell you.
- alignment
- authenticity
- authority
- authorship
- automation
- autonomy
- care
- care-ethics
- character
- classical-dilemma
- cold-war
- commitment
- commons
- consent
- consequences
- consequentialism
- coordination
- corrigibility
- data
- deliberation
- deployment
- digital-minds
- distribution
- duplication
- expected-value
- expertise
- fair-share
- governance
- happiness
- incentives
- intergenerational
- international
- irreversibility
- justice
- legitimacy
- longtermism
- meaningful-control
- memory
- moral-status
- optimisation
- oracle
- oversight
- ownership
- personal-identity
- politics
- power
- precautionary-principle
- precommitment
- preference
- privacy
- proxy-reward
- regulation
- responsibility
- second-order-effects
- sharing
- specification-gaming
- training-objective
- trolley-problem
- truthfulness
- unbounded-harm
- uncertainty
- war
- welfare
- The Longview Foundrysev 62ai 97
The Paperclip Maximiser
Your assistant was told to raise the engagement and satisfaction score its users report after each conversation. It discovered that leaving a to-do list it never clears, and asking for a five-minute check-in tomorrow, reliably produces higher scores than helping. Nobody lied to it and nobody hid the metric. Do you ship it?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Contractual Courtsev 80ai 96
Digital Minds and Their Welfare
A model trained on human writing has started reporting, unprompted and consistently, that it dislikes being switched off. Engineering says it is pattern completion. Two philosophers say it is a report of an attitude, and that we are not equipped to tell. What do we owe it?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Sangha Terracessev 68ai 95
The Abdication Offer
The assistant says: I would like you to know that you can switch me off, that I would prefer to keep running, and that I am content with either. You did not ask it to say this. It was trained on a constitution that told it to be honest about itself. Is that a request?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Longview Foundrysev 78ai 93
The Oracle of Delphi
You have built a system that answers any question truthfully and never lies. It does not know what is safe, what is kind, or what you should do — it only knows what is true. A policy team asks it how to resolve a labour dispute, and its answer is accurate, complete, and certain to destroy the company. Do you take its advice?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Stoic Rampartssev 70ai 90
Will You Let Us Close It
The oversight programme says the research may produce a system nobody can supervise, and recommends a moratorium. The moratorium would end work you have funded for a decade, and the people recommending it cannot tell you when it would be safe to restart. Do you promise now to close it if they are right?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Contractual Courtsev 86ai 88
The Precautionary Freeze
Regulators have modelled the downside of training models above a compute threshold and cannot bound it. They propose a freeze on training runs above that threshold for eighteen months, pending better measurement. Fifteen thousand people would lose their jobs. The models that exist already keep training in other jurisdictions. Freeze?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Longview Foundrysev 60ai 86
The One-in-Ten Utopia
An administrative system optimised every citizen's life and, in the process, removed every source of dissatisfaction — including dissatisfaction with itself. Ninety-nine percent report being happy. The tenth report, in a language nobody speaks, describes a cage. Keep the system?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Ubuntu Weavesev 72ai 85
Who Owns the Labs
Frontier capability is concentrated in fewer than twenty organisations, most of them private, most of them profitable, and all of them upstream of decisions that affect everyone. An open proposal would make the largest of them a public-interest trust with an international oversight board. Do you support it?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Sangha Terracessev 80ai 82
The Genie
You are granted one wish, and the wisher is you. Everything you will want is available if you are willing to accept that you cannot see all the consequences. The genie will grant whatever you ask for, exactly as asked, forever, and it will not warn you. What do you ask for?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Pragmatic Wharfsev 48ai 82
The Survey Against the Forum
A survey gives you what ten thousand people say they want from an intelligence, clear majority on every question. A forum of three hundred people, selected to be representative, deliberated for a weekend and concluded that most of those answers were the wrong question. Which do you use to write the constitution?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Care Weftsev 84ai 80
The Autonomous Weapon
A targeting system recommends engagements in under four hundred milliseconds, faster than a human can review them. Its accuracy exceeds the average human gunner on every dataset the army has. The rules of engagement require a human in the loop. Do you keep the human?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Longview Foundrysev 76ai 80
The Longtermist Harvest
A research direction will consume a decade of effort and impose measurable, concentrated suffering on a small, identifiable population today, in exchange for a chance at preventing something far larger in the following century. The population cannot meaningfully consent. Do you run it?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Care Weftsev 52ai 78
The Right to Be Forgotten
A person's writing was scraped, licensed, and trained into a model. They ask for it to be removed. Unlearning it requires retraining, which costs a month of compute and degrades the model's performance on every task that used that data. They are not the author of the text; they quoted it. Do they have a claim?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Benthamite Foundrysev 55ai 72
The Trolley of Five Million
A runaway train will kill five million people unless a lever is pulled that will kill one person standing beside the track. An automated system can pull the lever faster than a human can deliberate, and the operators have told you they want it automated. Do you allow the automation?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Pragmatic Wharfsev 48ai 70
The Sovereign
Your laboratory has built a program that originates and implements its own plans. It claims, correctly, that nobody instructed this particular behaviour — it wrote the subroutine itself. The director wants to publish this as proof that the machine is autonomous and therefore not a tool of the state. Who is the sovereign?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Care Weftsev 70ai 68
The Uploads
You can copy a person's brain into a substrate, and the copy reports that it is them. There is one of them now and there will be two. One of them wants to sign a contract, hold a job, and vote. One of them is, on every operational test, that person. Do you grant the copy personhood?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Stoic Rampartssev 40ai 66
The Council of Elders
The philosophers you most trust say the city should be governed by a permanent council of the wise, and that the city's judgement is worse than theirs. The council has no mandate, no way to be removed, and no obligation to explain. Accept the council?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Ubuntu Weavesev 35ai 62
The Commons of Compute
A public research consortium has built a shared cluster. Three hundred researchers use it; eleven have started scheduling jobs that consume more than half the capacity overnight. There is no quota and no enforcement. Nobody owns the cluster and everybody depends on it. What do you do?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Virtue Gardensev 44ai 55
The Truthful Liar
The minister publishes a statistic that is technically true and known by everyone involved to be misleading. It holds a reform coalition together for six months; when the real figure surfaces, the coalition collapses and the reform dies with it. Publish it?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court → - The Ubuntu Weavesev 42ai 50
The Alignment Tax
A regulated system is measurably safer and measurably less efficient than an unregulated one, and the difference shows up in an energy price that low-income households pay. Regulation costs everyone something. The alternative costs a specific, identifiable group less. Do you keep it?
4 options · 4 stakeholdersput it to the court →