Artificial Purpose Design
Create meaningful striving with chosen goals and binding constraints
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 98%
When technology removes natural scarcity and necessity, deliberately create a pocket of artificial scarcity. First choose an activity whose exercise is intrinsically valuable, such as skill, concentration, creativity, or cooperation. Then set an artificial goal that makes the activity purposeful. Finally, make constraints part of the goal by specifying which means count and excluding shortcuts that would erase the valued effort. Golf illustrates the mechanism: getting a ball into a hole has no natural necessity, and carrying it would be easier, but the chosen goal requires inconvenient clubs and rules. In a solved world, a person could similarly decline cognitive or physical enhancements for a particular challenge. The constraints are not inefficiencies to remove; they are the mechanism that preserves agency and striving.
Origin
Nick Bostrom generalizes games such as golf into a method for preserving agency and striving in a technologically solved world.
Core principles
- 01Purpose can be chosen when necessity disappears
- 02Constraints create room for skill and agency
- 03The permitted means are part of the goal
- 04Do not optimize away the activity you value
How to run it
- 1
Choose the valued activity
Identify the kind of agency, skill, or striving worth experiencing for its own sake.
Pro tip Name the experience you want, not merely an external result.
- 2
Set an artificial goal
Choose a concrete outcome that organizes attention and action even though it is not naturally necessary.
Pro tip Make success observable.
- 3
Define permitted means
Specify the tools, capabilities, and methods that count toward achieving the goal.
Watch out If every shortcut is allowed, the activity may disappear.
- 4
Exclude purpose-destroying shortcuts
Refuse enhancements or automation that would bypass the skill or effort the activity is meant to exercise.
Pro tip Write exclusions into the goal rather than relying on willpower.
- 5
Tune the constraints
Adjust rules so the challenge remains difficult enough to require agency without becoming futile.
Pro tip Change one constraint at a time.
- 6
Review intrinsic value
Check whether pursuing the constrained goal still produces the desired form of participation, growth, or shared creation.
Watch out Do not preserve a game after its activity stops being valuable.
In the wild
A player chooses the unnecessary goal of moving a ball through 18 holes. The rules forbid simply carrying it and require the inconvenient use of clubs. Those constraints create the opportunity to exercise visual judgment, motor skill, and concentration.
→ An arbitrary outcome supports genuinely valued activity and striving.
Common mistakes
Optimizing away the process
Using the fastest available shortcut may achieve the outcome while destroying the activity that made the goal worthwhile.
Confusing artificial with worthless
A goal can be invented while the agency, skill, and experience it enables remain intrinsically valuable.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for people who have ample resources or automation but still value skill, striving, and agency.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when an urgent real-world need should be solved directly rather than gamified.
From the transcript
“if there's no natural purpose, nothing we really need to do, you could create artificial purpose.”
“with games you set yourself some artificial goal. Moreover, you can impose artificial constraints like rules of the game.”
“I'm going to restrict myself. That's the only way to achieve this goal that I have set myself, this artificial goal because it includes it…”
From the episode
Nick Bostrom: How Entrepreneurs Can Win in an AI-Dominated World
Nick Bostrom