Agent-5 isn’t vastly superintelligent at politics (merely superhuman)
Look into the November 2027 section of the forecast’s Race Ending. In December 2027 Agent-5 is supposed to have a score of 4.0 at politics and 3.9 at forecasting, meaning that it would be “wildly superhuman” at both.
When I read AI2027 the “November 2027: Superhuman Politicking” felt much less extreme than “you can make someone that had <0.01 chance of winning be the clear favorite”. I guess AI2027 didn’t want to make a very strong statement about what is possible with wildly superhuman skills and so they used a relatively mild example (make the race continue despite Xi being willing to make large sacrifices—which seem to me >0.1 even without AI manipulations).
I am still unsure how much can be done with Agent-5. I know some people who don’t buy you will get “magical” political abilities during the first few years of the intelligence explosion (for a combination of not believing in very fast takeoff taking you to extremely advanced political skills, and not believing extremely advanced political skills would be that useful) but I am not very sympathetic to their views and I agree that if you get wildly superhuman political skills, the sort of manipulation you describe seems >0.5 likely to succeed.
Look into the November 2027 section of the forecast’s Race Ending. In December 2027 Agent-5 is supposed to have a score of 4.0 at politics and 3.9 at forecasting, meaning that it would be “wildly superhuman” at both.
My bad! Will edit.
When I read AI2027 the “November 2027: Superhuman Politicking” felt much less extreme than “you can make someone that had <0.01 chance of winning be the clear favorite”. I guess AI2027 didn’t want to make a very strong statement about what is possible with wildly superhuman skills and so they used a relatively mild example (make the race continue despite Xi being willing to make large sacrifices—which seem to me >0.1 even without AI manipulations).
I am still unsure how much can be done with Agent-5. I know some people who don’t buy you will get “magical” political abilities during the first few years of the intelligence explosion (for a combination of not believing in very fast takeoff taking you to extremely advanced political skills, and not believing extremely advanced political skills would be that useful) but I am not very sympathetic to their views and I agree that if you get wildly superhuman political skills, the sort of manipulation you describe seems >0.5 likely to succeed.