Astral Codex Ten

Charter

3 min read

Charter

Article

Charter is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 14, 2021 and March 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “by the Charter, any community can create a community interest declaration”; “The linked charter clause says: We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions”. It most often appears alongside China, AGI, AI.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 14, 2021
  • Last seen: March 01, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Prospectus On Próspera
April 14, 2021 · Original source
Honduras - with 70% of its population in poverty, the 5th highest murder rate in the world, and a political system widely recognized as corrupt and dysfunctional - was running low on options. They approached Romer and expressed interest in his idea. Together, Romer and Honduran officials developed the ZEDE (Spanish acronym for "Zone for Employment and Economic Development"), a generic model for creating special economic zones ("charter cities") within Honduras.
In 2009, Honduras' leftist-ish President Manuel Zelaya proposed a referendum to change the Constitution, which his opponents interpreted as a plot to remove term limits and rule indefinitely. The Supreme Court ruled against him, Zelaya ordered the military to assist in holding the referendum anyway, and the military held a coup instead. They appointed the next person in the line of succession the interim president, then held tense elections which were partially boycotted by Zelaya supporters and of debated legitimacy. Conservative candidate Porfirio Lobo Sosa won and became president. Lobo's chief of staff Octavio Sanchez stumbled upon the TED talk where Romer discussed charter cities and invited him to Honduras for negotiations.
Lobo's party controlled Congress and got a charter city law passed. After this the story gets kind of murky. Paul Romer's version was that they appointed him head of a Transparency Committee to make sure that whatever happened was in the best interests of Honduras, then started negotiating with a company called MKG Group without telling him. Upset at the opacity, and also at the negotiations themselves (he preferred having a foreign country administer the zones, not a private corporation), he resigned in protest. Honduras' version is that Romer was never appointed head of anything and there was no Transparency Committee.
Inline links: gets kind of murky
OpenAI's "Planning For AGI And Beyond"
March 01, 2023 · Original source
The linked charter clause says:
We have attempted to set up our structure in a way that aligns our incentives with a good outcome. We have a clause in our Charter about assisting other organizations to advance safety instead of racing with them in late-stage AGI development.
Inline links: a clause in our Charter