OK, cool, I think I understand where you’re coming from much better now. Seems like we basically agree and were just emphasizing different things in our original comments!
I’m in violent agreement that there’s a missing mood when people say “AIs will follow the law”. I think there’s something going on where people are like “but liberalism / decentralized competition have worked so well” and ignoring all the constraints on individual actors that make it so. Rule of law, external oversight, difficulty of conspiring with other humans, inefficiencies of gov’t that limit its ability to abuse power, etc.
And those constraints might all fall away with the AGI transition. That’s for a number of reasons: ownership of AGI could concentrate power; AGI complements existing power bases (e.g. govt has the authority but not a great ability to selectively enforce laws to silence opponents as mass-scale), it reduces the need for conspirators. As you note, it brings down others’ value as trading partners & collaborators. And takeoff dynamics could make things less like an iterated game and more like a one-shot. *taps head* can’t be punished if all your opponents are dead.
(I’m guessing you’d agree with all this, just posting to clarify where my head is at)
OK, cool, I think I understand where you’re coming from much better now. Seems like we basically agree and were just emphasizing different things in our original comments!
I’m in violent agreement that there’s a missing mood when people say “AIs will follow the law”. I think there’s something going on where people are like “but liberalism / decentralized competition have worked so well” and ignoring all the constraints on individual actors that make it so. Rule of law, external oversight, difficulty of conspiring with other humans, inefficiencies of gov’t that limit its ability to abuse power, etc.
And those constraints might all fall away with the AGI transition. That’s for a number of reasons: ownership of AGI could concentrate power; AGI complements existing power bases (e.g. govt has the authority but not a great ability to selectively enforce laws to silence opponents as mass-scale), it reduces the need for conspirators. As you note, it brings down others’ value as trading partners & collaborators. And takeoff dynamics could make things less like an iterated game and more like a one-shot. *taps head* can’t be punished if all your opponents are dead.
(I’m guessing you’d agree with all this, just posting to clarify where my head is at)