Tragedy of capitalism in a nutshell. The best action is to dismantle the artificial scarcity of doctors. But the most profitable action is to build a company that will profit from that scarcity - and, when it gets big enough, lobby to perpetuate it.

Yeah, this is my main risk scenario. But I think it makes more sense to talk about imbalance of power, not concentration of power. Maybe there will be one AI dictator, or one human+AI dictator, or many AIs, or many human+AI companies; but anyway most humans will end up at the bottom of a huge power differential. If history teaches us anything, this is a very dangerous prospect.

It seems the only good path is aligning AI to the interests of most people, not just its creators. But there's no commercial or military incentive to do that, so it probably won't happen by default.

The British weren't much more compassionate. North America and Australia were basically cleared of their native populations and repopulated with Europeans. Under British rule in India, tens of millions died from many famines, which instantly stopped after independence.

Colonialism didn't end due to benevolence. Wars for colonial liberation continued well after WWII and were very brutal, the Algerian war for example. I think the actual reason is that colonies stopped making economic sense.

So I guess the difference between your view and mine is that I think colonialism kept going basically as long as it benefited the dominant group. Benevolence or malevolence didn't come into it much. And if we get back to the AI conversation, my view is that when AIs become more powerful than people and can use resources more efficiently, the systemic gradient in favor of taking everything away from people will be just way too strong. It's a force acting above the level of individuals (hmm, individual AIs) - it will affect which AIs get created and which ones succeed.

I think a big part of the problem is that in a situation of power imbalance, there's a large reward lying around for someone to do bad things - plunder colonies for gold, slaves, and territory; raise and slaughter animals in factory farms - as long as the rest can enjoy the fruits of it without feeling personally responsible. There's no comparable gradient in favor of good things ("good" is often unselfish, uncompetitive, unprofitable).

I'm afraid in a situation of power imbalance these interpersonal differences won't matter much. I'm thinking of examples like enclosures in England, where basically the entire elite of the country decided to make poor people even poorer, in order to enrich themselves. Or colonialism, which lasted for centuries with lots of people participating, and the good people in the dominant group didn't stop it.

To be clear, I'm not saying there are no interpersonal differences. But if we find ourselves at the bottom of a power imbalance, I think those above us (even if they're very similar to humans) will just systemically treat us badly.

I'm not sure focusing on individual evil is the right approach. It seems to me that most people become much more evil when they aren't punished for it. A lot of evil is done by organizations, which are composed of normal people but can "normalize" the evil and protect the participants. (Insert usual examples such as factory farming, colonialism and so on.) So if we teach AIs to be as "aligned" as the average person, and then AIs increase in power beyond our ability to punish them, we can expect to be treated as a much-less-powerful group in history - which is to say, not very well.

The situation where AI is a good tool for manipulating public opinion, and the leading AI company has a bad reputation, seems unstable. Maybe AI just needs to get a little better, and then AI-written arguments in favor of AI will win public opinion decisively? This could "lock in" our trajectory even worse than now, and could happen long before AGI.

No problem about long reply, I think your arguments are good and give me a lot to think about.

My attempt at interpreting what you mean is that you’re drawing a distinction between morality about world-states vs. morality about process, internal details, experiencing it, ‘yourself’.

I just thought of another possible classification: "zeroth-order consequentialist" (care about doing the action but not because of consequences), "first-order consequentialist" (care about consequences), "second-order consequentialist" (care about someone else being able to choose what to do). I guess you're right that all of these can be translated into first-order. But by the same token, everything can be translated to zeroth-order. And the translation from second to first feels about as iffy as the translation from first to zeroth. So this still feels fuzzy to me, I'm not sure what is right.

Maybe HPMOR? A lot of people treated it like "our guru has written a fiction book that teaches you how to think more correctly, let's get more people to read it". And maybe it's possible to write such a book, but to me the book was charming in the moment but fell off hard when rereading later.

I guess it depends on your stance on monopolies. If you think monopolies result only from government interference in the market, then you'll be more laissez-faire. But if you notice that firms often want to join together in cozy cartels and have subtle ways to do it (see RealPage), or that some markets lead to natural monopolies, then the problem of protecting people from monopoly prices and reducing the reward for monopolization is a real problem. And yeah, banning price gouging is a blunt instrument - but it has the benefit of being direct. Fighting the more indirect aspects of monopolization is harder. So in this branch of the argument, if you want to allow price gouging, that has to come in tandem with better antimonopoly measures.