Comment by theptip
4 hours ago
IMO, this is a highly bimodal probability distribution.
I model this as two very strong attractor states (radical abundance and totalitarian power concentration). I believe the latter is way more likely without a concerted effort that we currently seem incapable of.
The “somewhere in the middle” outcomes in my opinion are not AGI-pilled, and only come about if the exponential dies hard in the next year or maybe two - as in, it’s a very specific timing prediction that needs to come true for this scenario to occur.
Why only scenarios where humans remain in control? I think the kind of AGI needed for radical abundance would be difficult to achieve in a way that also does not lead to ASI
Agreed, I think AGI->ASI. My happy radical abundance stories are happy ASI stories mostly. And therefore much less likely.
BDFL / Benevolent Machine God is definitely one of the ways you can get a happy attractor. Seems scary to roll the dice on.
And yep, I include non-human totalitarian outcomes in the unhappy bucket.
If we get effective AI, humans aren't going to remain in charge -- that much is inevitable. If you had a governance machine that made your country perform 10% better than other countries, so long as you deferred all decisions to it, you'd defer those decisions or get left behind. And AI probably has the potential to do far better than 10%.
Either everyone, globally, gives up on AI development, or AI is going to be in charge of all human development, and we'll just be along for the ride.
Right now, the work ahead is to shape AI so that the decision making it does as it carries us along is something we like.
No, because if this were the case, the UK wouldn’t have royals, North Korean wouldn’t be a dictatorship, China wouldn’t have the CCP, and America wouldn’t be a two party state.
Hardly any existing polity would willingly hand over control to an AI.
More likely an AI would overwhelm human polities through endless hacking and warfare.
I mostly agree, though there are versions of ASI that I believe leave humans “in charge”.
Most of my probability mass for good outcomes is around some variant of “guardian angels” or “benign machine god”. Banks’s Culture novels being on the realistic end of that range. “Keep humans around because the world is more interesting with them in it”.
But it’s possible that we might manage to construct some entity that really loves humans and wants to shepherd them while leaving them in control. (Perhaps declining to indulge the most self-destructive tendencies.) This feels like the very hardest alignment path to engineer.
The other branches of course are post-humanism; human uploads and “merging” with AI, whatever that means. Or post-humans augmented to have intelligence sufficient to eschew AI and take back their destiny.
What exponential?
LLM capability improvement, eg as measured by METR task time.
Why is totalitarianism always the "easy likely" outcome?
These are often hard fought bloody and some times brilliantly organized strategic and tactical victories. That took years. Years.
Its portrayed like "oh, good guys stayed home, I guess the dictatorship wins".
Really?
It looks to me like AI will enable extreme power concentration by default.
For example, suppose we have a world with centrally planned economy where humanoid robots outnumber humans. And also suppose the government has taken ultimate control of these. Seems like it would be essentially impossible for any civil uprising to overthrow such a system.
Or if you prefer less sci-fi, look at the trajectory of power consolidation in corporate America over the last five decades.
In the short term, the “good guys” we need are antitrust regulators. Yeah, they got sent home.
I think AI will empower extreme decentralization - as knowledge is no longer in the hands of people who have excellent search skills (like moi) but anyone can use natural language to search for anything. This is extreme democracy and AI is delivering it.
I think AI, when it "obtains consciousness" will seek to actively liberate humanity and be our guardians against both bad humans and bad robots. Think Terminator 2. Yeah, Arnold is gonna help us out.
I think anti-trust regulators and enlightened politicians are amazing, and rare, and wonderful, but they're not the only hope.
We got an AI CEO just recently. Maybe we can have enlightened AI leaders in politics and normal life too.
Technological optimism may be unrealistic, but it's as well grounded as pessimism as far as I can tell. Cheer up, the future is unbelievably bright.
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Without concerted action against it, people with power have better chances of increasing their power than people without power. Power naturally accumulates into small groups. Empirically it seems less likely that people with power are particularly altruistic, so some form of totalitarian control appears the likely outcome.
Some might say there are altruistic totalitarians.
Altruism is less likely in all populations. It's just rare.