Rob, Luisa, and the 80000 Hours team

I think similarly in Japan, I think the samurai were not keen on guns.

That greatly weakened their importance and their military competitiveness.

Yeah, so I guess probably a pattern that has been echoed repeatedly.

So I think so far the disempowerment you've been talking about is kind of maybe moving from more pluralism in society or like a broader base of political power in society towards something that's more like autocracy, more like oligarchy.

Do you also think that eventually like humans will just end up exceeding political control completely to AIs?

Okay, so you're saying kind of regardless of whether, you know, exactly what the system of government is in future, the fact that humans are redundant will, no matter what, end up resulting in them getting a smaller share of GDP and just not being able to control things in the way that they previously could.

Where I guess even in countries that were fairly authoritarian, the leadership still had to give some concern.

Well, they both had to like cultivate the population so they could do work.

And I guess they had to give some concern to how they felt about the leadership of the country because they might revolt.

And I guess like we're imagining in the future, especially if you have, you know, fully robot armies or something like that, revolution just might become inconceivable.

And so you don't have that option that is kind of constraining what the elite can do.

Yeah.

It sounds like you think it's possible or like eventually maybe even this elite that ends up with the most political power in the country could end up like deliberately or accidentally handing over the reins to AIs or machines of some form.

How might that occur?

Okay, let's return quickly now to, I guess, the cultural disempowerment, which I guess is like, again, the least fleshed out, the thing I think you and your team and I guess other people are still trying to get fully to grips with.

What are the best examples of cultural disempowerment that have occurred so far?

Are we getting any hints of like how this might play out or what we might expect to happen?

I see.

I think I still don't fully understand how that's an example of the kind of cultural disempowerment that you think we'll see much, much more extreme examples of in future.

Yeah, I mean, maybe the thing that comes to mind more for me is, I guess, this Dan Hendricks paper, it was Natural Selection Favors AIs Over Humans.