I prefer (classical / bedrock) liberalism as a frame for confronting societal issues with AGI, and am concerned by the degree to which recent right-wing populism has moved away from those tenets.
Liberalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the only framework I know of that even has a chance of resulting in a stable consensus. Other frames, left or right, have elements of coercion and / or majoritarianism that inevitably lead to legitimacy crises and instability as stakes get higher and disagreements wider.
My understanding is that a common take on both the left and right these days is that, well, liberalism actually hasn’t worked out so great for the masses recently, so everyone is looking for something else. But to me every “something else” on both the left and right just seems worse—Scott Alexander wrote a bunch of essays like 10y ago on various aspects of liberalism and why they’re good, and I’m not aware of any comprehensive rebuttal that includes an actually workable alternative.
Liberalism doesn’t imply that everyone needs to live under liberalism (especially my own preferred version / implementation of it), but it does provide a kind of framework for disagreement and settling differences in a way that is more peaceful and stable than any other proposal I’ve seen.
So for example on protectionism, I think most forms of protectionism (especially economic protectionism) are bad and counterproductive economic policy. But even well-implemented protectionism requires a justification beyond just “it actually is in the national interest to do this”, because it infringes on standard individual rights and freedoms. These freedoms aren’t necessarily absolute, but they’re important enough that it requires strong and ongoing justification for why a government is even allowed to do that kind of thing. AGI might be a pretty strong justification!
But at the least, I think anyone proposing a framework or policy position which deviates from a standard liberal position should acknowledge liberalism as a kind of starting point / default, and be able to say why the tradeoff of any individual freedom or right is worth making, each and every time it is made. (And I do not think right-wing frameworks and their standard bearers are even trying to do this, and that is very bad.)
I think the key issue for liberalism under AGI/ASI is that AGI/ASI makes value alignment matter way, way more to a polity, and in particular you cannot get a polity to make you live under AGI/ASI if the AGI/ASI doesn’t want you to live, because you are economically useless.
Liberalism’s goal is to avoid the value alignment question, and to mostly avoid the question of who should control society, but AGI/ASI makes the question unavoidable for your basic life.
Indeed, I think part of the difficulty of AI alignment is lots of people have trouble realizing that the basic things they take for granted under the current liberal order would absolutely fall away if AIs didn’t value their lives intrinisically, and had selfish utility functions.
The goal of liberalism is to make a society where vast value differences can interact without negative/0-sum conflict and instead trade peacefully, but this is not possible once we create a society where AIs can do all the work without human labor being necessary.
I like Vladimir Nesov’s comment, and while I have disagreements, they’re not central to his point, and the point still works, just in amended form:
Hard agree. It’s ironic that it took hundreds of years to get people to accept the unintuitive positive-sum-ness of liberalism, libertarianism, and trade. But now we might have to convince everyone that those seemingly-robust effects are likely to go away, and that governments and markets are going to be unintuitively harsh.
There are several important “happy accidents” that allowed almost everyone to thrive under liberalism, that are likely to go away: - Not usually enough variation in ability to allow sheer domination (though this is not surprising, due to selection—everyone who was completely dominated is mostly not around anymore). - Predictable death from old age as a leveler preventing power lock-in. - Sexual reproduction (and deleterious effects of inbreeding) giving gains to intermixing beyond family units, and reducing the all-or-nothing stakes of competition. - Not usually enough variation in reproductive rates to pin us to Malthusian equilibria.
I prefer (classical / bedrock) liberalism as a frame for confronting societal issues with AGI, and am concerned by the degree to which recent right-wing populism has moved away from those tenets.
Liberalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the only framework I know of that even has a chance of resulting in a stable consensus. Other frames, left or right, have elements of coercion and / or majoritarianism that inevitably lead to legitimacy crises and instability as stakes get higher and disagreements wider.
My understanding is that a common take on both the left and right these days is that, well, liberalism actually hasn’t worked out so great for the masses recently, so everyone is looking for something else. But to me every “something else” on both the left and right just seems worse—Scott Alexander wrote a bunch of essays like 10y ago on various aspects of liberalism and why they’re good, and I’m not aware of any comprehensive rebuttal that includes an actually workable alternative.
Liberalism doesn’t imply that everyone needs to live under liberalism (especially my own preferred version / implementation of it), but it does provide a kind of framework for disagreement and settling differences in a way that is more peaceful and stable than any other proposal I’ve seen.
So for example on protectionism, I think most forms of protectionism (especially economic protectionism) are bad and counterproductive economic policy. But even well-implemented protectionism requires a justification beyond just “it actually is in the national interest to do this”, because it infringes on standard individual rights and freedoms. These freedoms aren’t necessarily absolute, but they’re important enough that it requires strong and ongoing justification for why a government is even allowed to do that kind of thing. AGI might be a pretty strong justification!
But at the least, I think anyone proposing a framework or policy position which deviates from a standard liberal position should acknowledge liberalism as a kind of starting point / default, and be able to say why the tradeoff of any individual freedom or right is worth making, each and every time it is made. (And I do not think right-wing frameworks and their standard bearers are even trying to do this, and that is very bad.)
I think the key issue for liberalism under AGI/ASI is that AGI/ASI makes value alignment matter way, way more to a polity, and in particular you cannot get a polity to make you live under AGI/ASI if the AGI/ASI doesn’t want you to live, because you are economically useless.
Liberalism’s goal is to avoid the value alignment question, and to mostly avoid the question of who should control society, but AGI/ASI makes the question unavoidable for your basic life.
Indeed, I think part of the difficulty of AI alignment is lots of people have trouble realizing that the basic things they take for granted under the current liberal order would absolutely fall away if AIs didn’t value their lives intrinisically, and had selfish utility functions.
The goal of liberalism is to make a society where vast value differences can interact without negative/0-sum conflict and instead trade peacefully, but this is not possible once we create a society where AIs can do all the work without human labor being necessary.
I like Vladimir Nesov’s comment, and while I have disagreements, they’re not central to his point, and the point still works, just in amended form:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z8C29oMAmYjhk2CNN/non-superintelligent-paperclip-maximizers-are-normal#FTfvrr9E6QKYGtMRT
Hard agree. It’s ironic that it took hundreds of years to get people to accept the unintuitive positive-sum-ness of liberalism, libertarianism, and trade. But now we might have to convince everyone that those seemingly-robust effects are likely to go away, and that governments and markets are going to be unintuitively harsh.
There are several important “happy accidents” that allowed almost everyone to thrive under liberalism, that are likely to go away:
- Not usually enough variation in ability to allow sheer domination (though this is not surprising, due to selection—everyone who was completely dominated is mostly not around anymore).
- Predictable death from old age as a leveler preventing power lock-in.
- Sexual reproduction (and deleterious effects of inbreeding) giving gains to intermixing beyond family units, and reducing the all-or-nothing stakes of competition.
- Not usually enough variation in reproductive rates to pin us to Malthusian equilibria.