I wish the odds for getting AGI into trustworthy hands were better. The source of my optimism is the hope that those hands just need to be decent—to have what I’ve conceptualized as a positive empathy—sadism balance. That’s anyone who’s not a total sociopath (lacking empathy and tending toward vengeance and competition) and/or sadist. I hope that about 90-99% of humanity would eventually make the world vastly better with their AGI, just because it’s trivially easy for them to do, so it only requires the smallest bit of goodwill.
I wish I were more certain of that. I’ve tried to look a little at some historical examples of rulers born into power and with little risk of losing it. A disturbing number of them were quite callous rulers. They were usually surrounded by a group of advisors that got them to ignore the plight of the masses and focus on the concerns of an elite few. But this situation isn’t analogous—once your AGI hits superintelligence, it would be trivially easy to both help the masses in profound ways, and pursue whatever crazy schemes you and your friends have come up with. Thus my limited optimism.
WRT the distributed power structure of Western governments: I think AGI would be placed under executive authority, like the armed forces, and the US president and those with similar roles in other countries would hold near-total power, should they choose to use it. They could transform democracies into dictatorships with ease. And we very much do continue to elect selfish and power-hungry individuals, some of whom probably actually have a negative empathy-sadism balance.
Looking back, I note that you said I argued for “good odds” while I said “decent odds”. We may be in agreement on the odds.
But there’s more to consider here. Thanks again for engaging; I’d like to get more discussion of this topic going. I doubt you or I are seeing all of the factors that will be obvious in retrospect yet.
I wish the odds for getting AGI into trustworthy hands were better. The source of my optimism is the hope that those hands just need to be decent—to have what I’ve conceptualized as a positive empathy—sadism balance. That’s anyone who’s not a total sociopath (lacking empathy and tending toward vengeance and competition) and/or sadist. I hope that about 90-99% of humanity would eventually make the world vastly better with their AGI, just because it’s trivially easy for them to do, so it only requires the smallest bit of goodwill.
I wish I were more certain of that. I’ve tried to look a little at some historical examples of rulers born into power and with little risk of losing it. A disturbing number of them were quite callous rulers. They were usually surrounded by a group of advisors that got them to ignore the plight of the masses and focus on the concerns of an elite few. But this situation isn’t analogous—once your AGI hits superintelligence, it would be trivially easy to both help the masses in profound ways, and pursue whatever crazy schemes you and your friends have come up with. Thus my limited optimism.
WRT the distributed power structure of Western governments: I think AGI would be placed under executive authority, like the armed forces, and the US president and those with similar roles in other countries would hold near-total power, should they choose to use it. They could transform democracies into dictatorships with ease. And we very much do continue to elect selfish and power-hungry individuals, some of whom probably actually have a negative empathy-sadism balance.
Looking back, I note that you said I argued for “good odds” while I said “decent odds”. We may be in agreement on the odds.
But there’s more to consider here. Thanks again for engaging; I’d like to get more discussion of this topic going. I doubt you or I are seeing all of the factors that will be obvious in retrospect yet.