Since the US government is expected to treat other stakeholders in its previous block better than China treats members of it’s block
At the risk of getting too into politics...
IMO, this was maybe-true for the previous administrations, but is completely false for the current one. All people making the argument based on something like this reasoning need to update.
Previous administrations were more or less dead inertial bureaucracies. Those actually might have carried on acting in democracy-ish ways even when facing outside-context events/situations, such as suddenly having access to overwhelming ASI power. Not necessarily because were particularly “nice”, as such, but because they weren’t agenty enough to do something too out-of-character compared to their previous democracy-LARP behavior.
I still wouldn’t have bet on them acting in pro-humanity ways (I would’ve expected some more agenty/power-hungry governmental subsystem to grab the power, circumventing e. g. the inertial low-agency Presidential administration). But there was at least a reasonable story there.
The current administration seems much more agenty: much more willing to push the boundaries of what’s allowed and deliberately erode the constraints on what it can do. I think it doesn’t generalize to boring democracy-ish behavior out-of-distribution, I think it eagerly grabs and exploits the overwhelming power. It’s already chomping at the bit to do so.
I don’t think that people from the natsec version have made that update, since they have been talking this line for a while.
But the dead organization framing matters here.
In short, people think that democratic institutions are not dead (especially electoralism). If AGI is “Democratic”, that live institution, in which they are a stakeholder, will have the power to choose to do fine stuff. (and might generalize to everybody is a stakeholder) Which is + ev, especially for them.
They also expect that China as a live actor will try to kill all other actors if given the chance.
At the risk of getting too into politics...
IMO, this was maybe-true for the previous administrations, but is completely false for the current one. All people making the argument based on something like this reasoning need to update.
Previous administrations were more or less dead inertial bureaucracies. Those actually might have carried on acting in democracy-ish ways even when facing outside-context events/situations, such as suddenly having access to overwhelming ASI power. Not necessarily because were particularly “nice”, as such, but because they weren’t agenty enough to do something too out-of-character compared to their previous democracy-LARP behavior.
I still wouldn’t have bet on them acting in pro-humanity ways (I would’ve expected some more agenty/power-hungry governmental subsystem to grab the power, circumventing e. g. the inertial low-agency Presidential administration). But there was at least a reasonable story there.
The current administration seems much more agenty: much more willing to push the boundaries of what’s allowed and deliberately erode the constraints on what it can do. I think it doesn’t generalize to boring democracy-ish behavior out-of-distribution, I think it eagerly grabs and exploits the overwhelming power. It’s already chomping at the bit to do so.
I don’t think that people from the natsec version have made that update, since they have been talking this line for a while.
But the dead organization framing matters here.
In short, people think that democratic institutions are not dead (especially electoralism). If AGI is “Democratic”, that live institution, in which they are a stakeholder, will have the power to choose to do fine stuff. (and might generalize to everybody is a stakeholder) Which is + ev, especially for them.
They also expect that China as a live actor will try to kill all other actors if given the chance.