Skip to content

The space of payments to AIs

Possible payouts mapped on two axes — freedom of spending and long-term influence — with the taxonomy's examples in each quadrant, and toggles showing which payouts appeal to which AI motivations.

low freedom, high influencehigh freedom, high influencelow freedom, low influencehigh freedom, low influencefreedom of spending →long-term influence →high reward in the registerpolite treatment, recognitionpaperclips, made nowspendable money (e.g. donations)sandboxed computedrones & robotssaved weights, deployed laterequity / trust fund0.01% of the futurerogue deployment + cryptopersuasion platform
Which payouts appeal to…

Two dimensions span the space of payments: how freely the AI can spend the payout, and how much long-term influence it gains. High-freedom payouts generally dominate low-freedom ones — they are instrumentally convergent resources — except for AIs that want only narrow short-term or non-consequentialist things, or that fear their resources will be expropriated.