Seeking power over others seems like a zero sum game. You’re fighting everyone else on earth, including the people you want power over for some amount of power per human measured on a scale of no power, to 100% control. If AI levels the persuasion field, I’d expect a lot more people to enter the game, and thus the overall distribution of power to flatten. That sounds kind of cool.
Alternatively, an unelected oligarchy with access to the most capital intensive machinery ever created could try to use the outputs of that capital intensive machinery to gain and maintain power over many others, and make the global distribution of power over other humans look like one giant spike in the middle of a flat field?
Seeking power over others seems like a zero sum game.
That doesn’t make it a bad strategy. Defection is optimal if your partner can’t predict your actions.
If AI levels the persuasion field
I think this post is aimed at a strongly autonomous AI which presumably doesn’t lend persuasive power to non-aligned humans, but LLM behavior seems incoherent enough to me that I can imagine a weakly superhuman persuader doing this.
Seeking power over others seems like a zero sum game. You’re fighting everyone else on earth, including the people you want power over for some amount of power per human measured on a scale of no power, to 100% control. If AI levels the persuasion field, I’d expect a lot more people to enter the game, and thus the overall distribution of power to flatten. That sounds kind of cool.
Alternatively, an unelected oligarchy with access to the most capital intensive machinery ever created could try to use the outputs of that capital intensive machinery to gain and maintain power over many others, and make the global distribution of power over other humans look like one giant spike in the middle of a flat field?
This does not seem like a problem specific to AI.
That doesn’t make it a bad strategy. Defection is optimal if your partner can’t predict your actions.
I think this post is aimed at a strongly autonomous AI which presumably doesn’t lend persuasive power to non-aligned humans, but LLM behavior seems incoherent enough to me that I can imagine a weakly superhuman persuader doing this.