I think AI risk insurance might be incompatible with libertarianism. Consider the “rising tide” scenario, where AIs gradually get better than humans at everything, gradually take all jobs and outbid us for all resources to use in their economy, leaving us with nothing. According to libertarianism this is ok, you just got outcompeted, mate. And if you band together with other losers and try to extract payment from superior workers who are about to outcompete you, well, then you’re clearly a villain according to libertarianism. Even if these “superior workers” are machines that will build a future devoid of anything good or human. It makes complete sense to fight against that, but it requires a better theory than libertarianism.
I think there isn’t an issue as long as you ensure property rights for the entire universe now. Like if every human is randomly assigned a silver of the universe (and then can trade accordingly), then I think the rising tide situation can be handled reasonably. We’d need to ensuring that AIs as a class can’t get away with violating our existing property rights to the universe, but the situation is analogous to other rights.
This is a bit of an insane notion of property rights and randomly giving a chunk to every currently living human is pretty arbitrary, but I think everything works fine if we ensure these rights now.
You think AIs won’t be able to offer humans some deals that are appealing in the short term but lead to AIs owning everything in the long term? Humans offer such deals to other humans all the time and libertarianism doesn’t object much.
Why is this a problem? People who are interested in the long run can buy these property rights while people who don’t care can sell them.
If AIs respect these property rights[1] but systematically care more about the long run future, then so be it. I expect that in practice some people will explicitly care about the future (e.g. me) and also some people will want to preserve option value.
Even if you have long term preferences, bold of you to assume that these preferences will stay stable in a world with AIs. I expect an AI, being smarter than a human, can just talk you into signing away the stuff you care about. It’ll be like money-naive people vs loan sharks, times 1000.
I expect an AI, being smarter than a human, can just talk you into signing away the stuff you care about. It’ll be like money-naive people vs loan sharks, times 1000.
I think this is just a special case of more direct harms/theft? Like imagine that some humans developed the ability to mind control others, this can probably be handled via the normal system of laws etc. The situation gets more confusing as the AIs are more continuous with more mundane persuasion (that we currently allow in our society). But, I still think you can build a broadly liberal society which handles super-persuasion.
If nothing else, I expect mildly-superhuman sales and advertising will be enough to ensure that the human share of the universe will decrease over time. And I expect the laws will continue being at least mildly influenced by deep pockets, to keep at least some such avenues possible. If you imagine a hard lock on these and other such things, well that seems unrealistic to me.
If you imagine a hard lock on these and other such things, well that seems unrealistic to me.
I’m just trying to claim that this is possible in principle. I’m not particularly trying to argue this is realistic.
I’m just trying to argue something like “If we gave out property right to the entire universe and backchained from ensuring the reasonable enforcement of these property rights and actually did a good job on enforcement, things would be fine.”
This implicitly requires handling violations of property rights (roughly speaking) like:
War/coups/revolution/conquest
Super-persuasion and more mundane concerns of influence
I don’t know how to scalably handle AI revolution without ensuring a property basically as strong as alignment, but that seems orthogonal.
We also want to handle “AI monopolies” and “insufficient AI competition resulting in dead weight loss (or even just AIs eating more of the surplus than is necessary)”. But, we at least in theory can backchain from handling this to what intervertions are needed in practice.
Human labor becomes worthless but you can still get returns from investments. For example, if you have land, you should rent the land to the AGI instead of selling it.
People who have been outcompeted won’t keep owning a lot of property for long. Something or other will happen to make them lose it. Maybe some individuals will find ways to stay afloat, but as a class, no.
Does any of this discussion (both branches from your first comment)change if one starts with the assuming that AIs are actually owned, and can be bought, by humans? Owned directly but some and indirectly by others via equity in AI companies.
Like I said, people who have been outcompeted won’t keep owning a lot of property for long. Even if that property is equity in AI companies, something or other will happen to make them lose it. (A very convincing AI-written offer of stock buyback, for example.)
I think AI risk insurance might be incompatible with libertarianism. Consider the “rising tide” scenario, where AIs gradually get better than humans at everything, gradually take all jobs and outbid us for all resources to use in their economy, leaving us with nothing. According to libertarianism this is ok, you just got outcompeted, mate. And if you band together with other losers and try to extract payment from superior workers who are about to outcompete you, well, then you’re clearly a villain according to libertarianism. Even if these “superior workers” are machines that will build a future devoid of anything good or human. It makes complete sense to fight against that, but it requires a better theory than libertarianism.
I think there isn’t an issue as long as you ensure property rights for the entire universe now. Like if every human is randomly assigned a silver of the universe (and then can trade accordingly), then I think the rising tide situation can be handled reasonably. We’d need to ensuring that AIs as a class can’t get away with violating our existing property rights to the universe, but the situation is analogous to other rights.
This is a bit of an insane notion of property rights and randomly giving a chunk to every currently living human is pretty arbitrary, but I think everything works fine if we ensure these rights now.
You think AIs won’t be able to offer humans some deals that are appealing in the short term but lead to AIs owning everything in the long term? Humans offer such deals to other humans all the time and libertarianism doesn’t object much.
Why is this a problem? People who are interested in the long run can buy these property rights while people who don’t care can sell them.
If AIs respect these property rights[1] but systematically care more about the long run future, then so be it. I expect that in practice some people will explicitly care about the future (e.g. me) and also some people will want to preserve option value.
Or we ensure they obey these property rights, e.g. with alignment.
Even if you have long term preferences, bold of you to assume that these preferences will stay stable in a world with AIs. I expect an AI, being smarter than a human, can just talk you into signing away the stuff you care about. It’ll be like money-naive people vs loan sharks, times 1000.
I think this is just a special case of more direct harms/theft? Like imagine that some humans developed the ability to mind control others, this can probably be handled via the normal system of laws etc. The situation gets more confusing as the AIs are more continuous with more mundane persuasion (that we currently allow in our society). But, I still think you can build a broadly liberal society which handles super-persuasion.
If nothing else, I expect mildly-superhuman sales and advertising will be enough to ensure that the human share of the universe will decrease over time. And I expect the laws will continue being at least mildly influenced by deep pockets, to keep at least some such avenues possible. If you imagine a hard lock on these and other such things, well that seems unrealistic to me.
I’m just trying to claim that this is possible in principle. I’m not particularly trying to argue this is realistic.
I’m just trying to argue something like “If we gave out property right to the entire universe and backchained from ensuring the reasonable enforcement of these property rights and actually did a good job on enforcement, things would be fine.”
This implicitly requires handling violations of property rights (roughly speaking) like:
War/coups/revolution/conquest
Super-persuasion and more mundane concerns of influence
I don’t know how to scalably handle AI revolution without ensuring a property basically as strong as alignment, but that seems orthogonal.
We also want to handle “AI monopolies” and “insufficient AI competition resulting in dead weight loss (or even just AIs eating more of the surplus than is necessary)”. But, we at least in theory can backchain from handling this to what intervertions are needed in practice.
I agree that there is a concern due to an AI monopoly on certain goods and services, but I think this should be possible to handle via other means.
Human labor becomes worthless but you can still get returns from investments. For example, if you have land, you should rent the land to the AGI instead of selling it.
People who have been outcompeted won’t keep owning a lot of property for long. Something or other will happen to make them lose it. Maybe some individuals will find ways to stay afloat, but as a class, no.
Does any of this discussion (both branches from your first comment)change if one starts with the assuming that AIs are actually owned, and can be bought, by humans? Owned directly but some and indirectly by others via equity in AI companies.
Like I said, people who have been outcompeted won’t keep owning a lot of property for long. Even if that property is equity in AI companies, something or other will happen to make them lose it. (A very convincing AI-written offer of stock buyback, for example.)