Rob, Luisa, and the 80000 Hours team

It would slow things down.

It would introduce errors that have to be corrected and force the AIs to wait for us to do things that they could have done much faster.

And then at that stage, it's really hard to see why businesses would be employing humans on any significant scale for ordinary practical purposes.

And what do you think stems from that?

So at the point that people are no longer, for the most part, employed in kind of productive work, what sort of things start happening?

Okay, so in the paper, you map out like three categories of mechanisms that potentially push us towards disempowerment of human beings and I guess like human ability to direct its own future.

There's economic disempowerment, which we've touched on a little bit.

There's also cultural disempowerment and kind of political or state disempowerment.

Maybe let's do state or political disempowerment first.

How would humans potentially begin to lose control over their own governments?

Yeah.

So the way that I would boil this down is, for most of human history, most people in a society had very little control over their government.

This sort of liberal democracy that most listeners will be living in is an aberration, basically, and a fairly modern aberration that, not coincidentally, probably appeared around the point of the Industrial Revolution and I think was then given an extra kick in the butt by the beginning of office work and knowledge work and stuff that required education.

And almost certainly we've seen that the growth of that kind of government, that kind of social system, because it was economically fit, it was a good way for a government and a country to gain power because it led to like more production, higher productivity, more development of more R&D, like more military power, all of that.

At the point that human beings are no longer doing almost any work, there is no competitive pressure that requires a government or the most powerful people in a society to nurture and to share the power with all of the other people in their country.

They could potentially not provide them with any education, not give them any democratic rights, not involve them in sort of the error correction processes that allow a country to correct its mistakes.

And nonetheless, the country may end up equally just as militarily powerful as it might have been otherwise.

That's really, yeah.

Okay.

So you're saying in some ways democracy could end up on some dimensions being worse, at least in terms of your like inter-country competition.