You right that you could vote on whether to have any safeguards (and their contents if yes) instead of installing them top-down. But then who is it that frames the matter in that way (the question of safeguards getting voted on first before everyone gets some resources/influence allocated, versus just starting with the second part without the safeguards)? Who sets up the voting mechanism (e.g., if there’s disagreement, is it just majority wins or should there be some Archipelago-style split in case a significant minority wants things some other way)?
My point is that terms like “democratic” (or “libertarian,” for the Archipelago vision) are under-defined. To specify processes that capture the spirit behind these terms as ideals, we have to make some judgment calls. You might think that having democratic ideals also means everyone voting democratically on all these judgment calls, but I don’t think that this changes the dynamic because there’s an infinite regress where you need certain judgement calls for that, too.
And at this point I feel like asking, if we have to lock in some decisions anyway to get any democratic process off the ground, we may as well pick a setup top-down where the most terrible outcomes (involuntary torture) are less likely to happen for “accidental” reasons that weren’t even necessarily “the will of the people.” Sure, maybe you could have a phase where you gather inputs and objections to the initial setup, and vote on changes if there’s a concrete counterproposal that gains enough traction via legitimate channels. Still, I’d very much would want to start by setting a well-thought-out default top-down rather than leaving everything up to chance.
It’s not “more democratic” to leave the process underspecified. If you just put 8 billion people in a chat forum without too many rules hooked up to the AGI sovereign that controls the future, it’ll get really messy and the result, whatever it is, may not reflect “the will of the people” any better than if we had started out with something already more guided and structured.
You right that you could vote on whether to have any safeguards (and their contents if yes) instead of installing them top-down. But then who is it that frames the matter in that way (the question of safeguards getting voted on first before everyone gets some resources/influence allocated, versus just starting with the second part without the safeguards)? Who sets up the voting mechanism (e.g., if there’s disagreement, is it just majority wins or should there be some Archipelago-style split in case a significant minority wants things some other way)?
My point is that terms like “democratic” (or “libertarian,” for the Archipelago vision) are under-defined. To specify processes that capture the spirit behind these terms as ideals, we have to make some judgment calls. You might think that having democratic ideals also means everyone voting democratically on all these judgment calls, but I don’t think that this changes the dynamic because there’s an infinite regress where you need certain judgement calls for that, too.
And at this point I feel like asking, if we have to lock in some decisions anyway to get any democratic process off the ground, we may as well pick a setup top-down where the most terrible outcomes (involuntary torture) are less likely to happen for “accidental” reasons that weren’t even necessarily “the will of the people.” Sure, maybe you could have a phase where you gather inputs and objections to the initial setup, and vote on changes if there’s a concrete counterproposal that gains enough traction via legitimate channels. Still, I’d very much would want to start by setting a well-thought-out default top-down rather than leaving everything up to chance.
It’s not “more democratic” to leave the process underspecified. If you just put 8 billion people in a chat forum without too many rules hooked up to the AGI sovereign that controls the future, it’ll get really messy and the result, whatever it is, may not reflect “the will of the people” any better than if we had started out with something already more guided and structured.