First, the rich people who live off of capital gains might not be disempowered, assuming the AI is aligned to the original owners, assuming AI is aligned to the property rights of existing owners, since they own the AIs.
But to answer the question on why does the property rights system not just completely dispossess anyone who is not in fact going to work today, I have a couple of answers.
I also agree with @CronoDAS, but I’m attempting to identify the upper/meta-level reasons here.
Number 1 is that technological development fundamentally wasn’t orgothonal, and it turned out that in order for a nation to become powerful, you had to empower the citizens as well.
The Internet is a plausible counterexample, but even then it’s developed in democracies.
Or putting it pithily, something like liberal democracy was necessary to make nations more powerful, and once you have some amount of liberalism/democracy, it’s game-theoretically favored to have more democracy and liberalism:
This is also the reason why the “more” democratic a nation gets the more it tends to support civil rights and civil liberties. The closer a nation gets to a true democracy, run indirectly by the majority coalition, the more that majority coalition will vote and organize for the tools and means to monitor (and potentially insurrect against) the rogue agents inside its government that want to take power from that majority coalition and give it to some other group. Civil liberties are not just some cultural artifact, present in some countries that “want to fight for them” and not in others; they’re also the expression of the majority coalition’s will to rule.
My second answer to this question is that in the modern era, moderate redistribution actually helps the economy, but extreme redistribution both is counterproductive and unnecessary, unlike ancient and post-AGI societies, and this means there’s an incentive outside of values to actually give most people what they need to survive.
My third answer is that currently, no human is able to buy their way out of society, and even the currently richest person simply can’t remain wealthy without at least somewhat submitting to governments.
Number 4 is that property expropriation in a way that is useful to the expropriatior has become more difficult over time.
Much of the issue of AI risk is that AI society will likely be able to simply be independent of human society, and this means that strategies like disempowering/killing all humans becoming viable in a way they aren’t, to name one example of changes in the social order.
First, the rich people who live off of capital gains might not be disempowered, assuming the AI is aligned to the original owners, assuming AI is aligned to the property rights of existing owners, since they own the AIs.
But to answer the question on why does the property rights system not just completely dispossess anyone who is not in fact going to work today, I have a couple of answers.
I also agree with @CronoDAS, but I’m attempting to identify the upper/meta-level reasons here.
Number 1 is that technological development fundamentally wasn’t orgothonal, and it turned out that in order for a nation to become powerful, you had to empower the citizens as well.
The Internet is a plausible counterexample, but even then it’s developed in democracies.
Or putting it pithily, something like liberal democracy was necessary to make nations more powerful, and once you have some amount of liberalism/democracy, it’s game-theoretically favored to have more democracy and liberalism:
My second answer to this question is that in the modern era, moderate redistribution actually helps the economy, but extreme redistribution both is counterproductive and unnecessary, unlike ancient and post-AGI societies, and this means there’s an incentive outside of values to actually give most people what they need to survive.
My third answer is that currently, no human is able to buy their way out of society, and even the currently richest person simply can’t remain wealthy without at least somewhat submitting to governments.
Number 4 is that property expropriation in a way that is useful to the expropriatior has become more difficult over time.
Much of the issue of AI risk is that AI society will likely be able to simply be independent of human society, and this means that strategies like disempowering/killing all humans becoming viable in a way they aren’t, to name one example of changes in the social order.