One of the most profound challenges facing humanity is ensuring the alignment of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with human values while also preparing for scenarios where humanity might need a successor—whether due to AGI risks or other existential threats like environmental collapse or pandemics. This idea bridges these concerns by exploring how AGI could be designed not just to align with human values but also to serve as a potential inheritor of human culture, knowledge, and creativity.

The Dual-Track Approach

One way to address this could involve two interconnected tracks:

• AGI Alignment Research: Developing frameworks to ensure AGI systems understand and uphold human values while recursively improving themselves without deviation. This would draw on AI, cognitive science, and ethics.
• Post-Human Successor Design: Exploring how AGI—or other digital or biologically inspired intelligences—could preserve and propagate human culture and knowledge if humanity were to disappear. This might involve simulations, digital archives, or synthetic minds that mimic human thought.

The first track provides the foundation for the second: understanding AGI well enough to align it might also make it a viable custodian of human legacy.

Stakeholder Alignment and Feasibility

Several groups stand to benefit from this approach, including humanity at large (by mitigating existential risks), future post-human civilizations (by preserving cultural continuity), and researchers (by expanding interdisciplinary collaboration). Stakeholders like AI developers, governments, and philosophers already share an interest in these goals, making alignment feasible.

Key assumptions to validate would include:

• Whether AGI alignment is solvable (could be tested via narrow AI experiments).
• Whether non-AGI extinction risks are significant enough to warrant successors (could be assessed through risk analysis studies).

From Theory to Execution

An initial phase might begin with research—publishing frameworks, assembling interdisciplinary teams, and small-scale simulations. Later phases could involve prototyping aligned AGI systems or digital successor models. An MVP could be a simulation tool that demonstrates how alignment and cultural preservation might function in tandem.

For funding, collaborations with institutions focused on existential risks (e.g., OpenAI, FHI) or tech firms investing in AGI could be explored. The unique advantage here is merging two typically separate fields—AGI alignment and post-human continuity—into a unified framework.