Rob, Luisa, and the 80000 Hours team

I mean, I guess you were saying it's like humans who decide what is good.

I suppose you're like an anti-realist?

Yeah.

Yeah, well, I guess, I mean, if you think that there is something that is objectively valuable, even if people, independent of whether people believe that, then I guess you could have a future in which like humans are disempowered and perhaps, I don't know, the machines end up going and doing that and like no human would have endorsed it at the time, but that could still potentially be a good thing.

I guess if you have...

also a view on which it's good to satisfy human preferences, but it will also be good to satisfy machine preferences or AI preferences at the point perhaps where they're conscious or they have subjective experiences, then I guess you might be a little bit less stressed about handing over control or handing over resources to AIs to pursue their own agenda.

I guess, so you're saying whatever it is that we want to happen, why don't we just maintain control so that then we can decide whether that is the thing that is happening or not?

Exactly.

So it could be that by coincidence we get disempowered and then the thing that we would have liked to happen happens anyway, but why leave it to chance?

Yes, exactly.

Okay.

I guess, how much is this picture complicated by the fact that lots of humans disagree and have like very conflicting preferences about how things might go?

Okay.

What's the strongest argument for not worrying about this in your mind?

I mean, there are people out there who are like,

It'll be good for us to hand over to the AIs.

It'll be good for humanity to be disempowered sooner or later, maybe sooner.

We're not as smart.

We're not as wise.

We will squander the resources.