Description du poste
on gradual disempowerment, why UBI and its alternatives won’t work, and what qualities a post-labour, post-AGI wealth distribution system needs.
Of all the risks that come from transformative artificial general intelligence, gradual disempowerment is the least well-known in my experience. Misuse and misalignment are easy for people to grasp: we have films like The Terminator, and the worst-case scenarios here are easier to picture. With misuse, you can point to terrorists getting hold of highly capable models, and bad actors building bioweapons. With misalignment we now have Hugging Face as a solid example, but even without that, things like machine betrayal and deception aren’t hard to understand or fear, because we can map these behaviours onto human traits that we disapprove of.
Gradual disempowerment, at least for most people, is much fuzzier. It requires some downstream thinking, tracing not just first-order effects but second- and third-order institutional incentives that aren’t immediately obvious. And I guess there’s no film about it. [1]Three pieces that do a great job of explaining it which convinced me in the first place are: The Intelligence Curse[2], this Gradual Disempowerment paper, and No-one Escapes the Permanent Underclass.
But it’s rather unlikely I’ll get through to my non-AI safety friends by forcing them to take the time go and read these essays. So in simple terms, the way I like to do a quick pitch to them is as follows:
Why do societal structures and institutions serve human interests? There is perhaps, when you think about, no reason for them to do so outside of the labour we offer. Assume as a result of AGI (and skipping some steps here) the labour falls to zero or very close to zero. There is no “workforce” like it looks today. Let’s think about how we currently pay income tax to the government, and say for example they spend that on public education to develop human capital. Why would they spend it on public education if there is no nee