Regarding the weakness or slow-actingness of economic effects: it is true that the fundamental thing that forces the economic incentives to percolate to the surface and actually have an effect is selection pressure, and selection pressure is often slow-acting. However: remember that the time that matters is not necessarily calendar time.
Most basically, the faster the rate of progress and change, the faster selection pressures operate.
As MacInnes et. al. point out in Anarchy as Architect, the effects of selection pressures often don’t manifest for a long time, but then appear suddenly in times of crisis—for example, the World Wars leading to a bunch of industrialization-derived state structure changes happening very quickly. The more you believe that takeoff will be chaotic and involve crises and tests of institutional capacity, the more you should believe that unconscious selection pressures will operate quickly.
You don’t need to wait for unconscious selection to work, if the agents in charge of powerful actors can themselves plan and see the writing on the wall. And the more planning capacity you add into the world (a default consequence of AI!), the more effectively you should expect competing agents (that do not coordinate) to converge on the efficient outcome.
Of course, it’s true that if takeoff is fast enough then you might get a singleton and different strategies apply—though of course singletons (whether human organizations or AIs) immediately create vast risk if they’re misaligned. And if you have enough coordination, then you can in fact avoid selection pressures (but a world with such effective coordination seems to be quite an alien world from ours or any that historically existed, and unlikely to be achieved in the short time remaining until powerful AI arrives, unless some incredibly powerful AI-enabled coordination tech arrives quickly). But this requires not just coordination, but coordination between well-intentioned actors who are not corrupted by power. If you enable perfect coordination between, say, the US and Chinese government, you might just get a dual oligarchy controlling the world and ruling over everyone else, rather than a good lightcone.
If humanity loses control and it’s not due to misaligned AI, it’s much more likely to be due to an AI enabled coup, AI propaganda or AI enabled lobbying than humans having insufficient economic power.
AI-enabled coups and AI-enabled lobbying all get majorly easier and more effective the more humanity’s economic role have been erased. Fixing them is also all part of maintaining the balance of power in society.
There’s a saying “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” that I think applies here. I’m bearish on [approaches] opposed to multi-disciplinary approaches that don’t artificially inflate particular factors.
I share the exact same sentiment, but for me it applies in reverse. Much “basic” alignment discourse seems to admit exactly two fields—technical machine learning and consequentialist moral philosophy—while sweeping aside considerations about economics, game theory, politics, social changes, institutional design, culture, and generally the lessons of history. A big part of what intelligence-curse.ai tries to do is take this more holistic approach, though of course it can’t focus on everything, and in particular neglects the culture / info environment / memetics side. Things that try to be even more holistic are my scenario and Gradual Disempowerment.
The three factors you identified: fast progress, vulnerabilities during times of crisis and AI progress increasing the chance of viable strategies being leveraged apply just as much, if not more, to coups, propaganda and AI lobbying.
Basically, I see two strategies that could make sense: either we attempt to tank these societal risks following the traditional alignment strategy or decide tanking is too risky and we mitigate the societal risks that are most likely to take us out (my previous comment identified some specific risks).
I see either of these strategies is defensible, but in neither does it make sense to prioritise the risks from the loss of economic power.
We mention the threat of coups—and Davidson et. al.’s paper on it—several times.
Regarding the weakness or slow-actingness of economic effects: it is true that the fundamental thing that forces the economic incentives to percolate to the surface and actually have an effect is selection pressure, and selection pressure is often slow-acting. However: remember that the time that matters is not necessarily calendar time.
Most basically, the faster the rate of progress and change, the faster selection pressures operate.
As MacInnes et. al. point out in Anarchy as Architect, the effects of selection pressures often don’t manifest for a long time, but then appear suddenly in times of crisis—for example, the World Wars leading to a bunch of industrialization-derived state structure changes happening very quickly. The more you believe that takeoff will be chaotic and involve crises and tests of institutional capacity, the more you should believe that unconscious selection pressures will operate quickly.
You don’t need to wait for unconscious selection to work, if the agents in charge of powerful actors can themselves plan and see the writing on the wall. And the more planning capacity you add into the world (a default consequence of AI!), the more effectively you should expect competing agents (that do not coordinate) to converge on the efficient outcome.
Of course, it’s true that if takeoff is fast enough then you might get a singleton and different strategies apply—though of course singletons (whether human organizations or AIs) immediately create vast risk if they’re misaligned. And if you have enough coordination, then you can in fact avoid selection pressures (but a world with such effective coordination seems to be quite an alien world from ours or any that historically existed, and unlikely to be achieved in the short time remaining until powerful AI arrives, unless some incredibly powerful AI-enabled coordination tech arrives quickly). But this requires not just coordination, but coordination between well-intentioned actors who are not corrupted by power. If you enable perfect coordination between, say, the US and Chinese government, you might just get a dual oligarchy controlling the world and ruling over everyone else, rather than a good lightcone.
AI-enabled coups and AI-enabled lobbying all get majorly easier and more effective the more humanity’s economic role have been erased. Fixing them is also all part of maintaining the balance of power in society.
I agree that AI propaganda, and more generally AI threats to the information environment & culture, are a big & different deal that intelligence-curse.ai don’t address except in passing. You can see the culture section of Gradual Disempowerment (by @Jan_Kulveit @Raymond D & co.) for more on this.
I share the exact same sentiment, but for me it applies in reverse. Much “basic” alignment discourse seems to admit exactly two fields—technical machine learning and consequentialist moral philosophy—while sweeping aside considerations about economics, game theory, politics, social changes, institutional design, culture, and generally the lessons of history. A big part of what intelligence-curse.ai tries to do is take this more holistic approach, though of course it can’t focus on everything, and in particular neglects the culture / info environment / memetics side. Things that try to be even more holistic are my scenario and Gradual Disempowerment.
The three factors you identified: fast progress, vulnerabilities during times of crisis and AI progress increasing the chance of viable strategies being leveraged apply just as much, if not more, to coups, propaganda and AI lobbying.
Basically, I see two strategies that could make sense: either we attempt to tank these societal risks following the traditional alignment strategy or decide tanking is too risky and we mitigate the societal risks that are most likely to take us out (my previous comment identified some specific risks).
I see either of these strategies is defensible, but in neither does it make sense to prioritise the risks from the loss of economic power.