Rob, Luisa, and the 80000 Hours team

You're living in a country where there is kind of a small elite that basically makes all of the decisions.

How would things change in this new picture where you're even less necessary for them than before?

So in the UK at the moment, it's true that the government, in as much as it's separate from the population, does need its people to continue working and paying taxes and doing stuff.

But if, like very quickly, we all were no longer required and we were replaced by AIs and businesses, it's not...

obvious to me that immediately the country would start becoming autocratic.

It feels like there are other cultural things going on or just even preferences among the people that would cause them to not immediately want to become an authoritarian country and just cancel elections.

Do you agree with that?

And do you more think, well, this would happen gradually over time because sort of the support for democracy would wane and the ability of ordinary people to object to things if they change would just become weaker and weaker over time?

So I guess imagine that Canada or the UK did end up with a leader or governing party that was keen to basically whittle away at democracy and basically install themselves indefinitely.

I guess how would you imagine that progressing?

It sounds like you're saying they would have all of the tools that they have available now and then the options for resistance among the broader population are just so much weaker than they were before.

So it seems like, yeah, there's a bit of an internal tension here where you're saying, on the one hand, people are going to lose their political power, but they'll have more time to make trouble than ever and more ability to make trouble than ever because they'll be able to get AIs to assist them.

You're saying it's almost because they're able to be such strong advocates or be such a potent activist that the government will feel the need to crack down on them and that will be the kind of proximate cause of them losing their kind of political freedom.

I must admit, I'm not sure how fiercely competitive the sort of, I guess, geopolitical situation will be, whether it'll be like sufficiently intense that countries will, you know, like the prime minister or president of a country would feel like their hands are tied.

They just have to take away the political freedom of people in their country in order to keep up and avoid too much unrest.

It just feels like that effect just might not be powerful enough to overwhelm the fact that, you know, the population will have an interest in defending their rights.

And at this point, we're imagining they still have substantial wealth.

They still have, you know, substantial ability

to agitate.

Yeah, I think it's the case that knights also, I think in France and England, were not keen on the longbow being introduced because that greatly weakened their importance and the need for the state to give them lots of power.