Rob, Luisa, and the 80000 Hours team

I guess the broader point is in as much as hard military power is the robots, is this AI-driven military equipment, then anyone who can get the AI to follow their instructions has all the hard military power.

They can stage a coup.

How would you undo it?

Yes, exactly.

I mean, I guess, you know, as we talk about in the episode with Tom Davidson, there's many different protections that we could put in place in order to try to make this more difficult.

But it's not completely obvious that we will put in a big effort to do that.

And even if we did, like, possibly we could fail.

And it's one thing that...

There's a lot of time in which these coups might be able to occur, and then they're very difficult to undo once they have occurred.

So it's like a bit of a one-way gate, potentially.

Let's talk more now about, I guess, the economic disempowerment mechanism.

So I guess we've done a basic intro to it, but I think many people would have the objection, or it would just immediately occur to them,

If it's the case that all AIs are basically just owned and operated by humans, we're not really becoming economically disempowered in the sense of having less income, because all of the work that the AIs would do, all of the profit that they would generate, all of the surplus that's created by their, I guess, ability to do amazing things for very little cost, all of that will flow back to human beings, who then will be richer and, in a sense, more empowered than ever before.

Why isn't that such a strong protection that we should feel pretty good about this?

I see.

So you're saying in as much as, at least to begin with, all of the rent is flowing through to humans.

There's one question, which is this might lead to an awful lot of inequality because it might be that you can't really earn labor income anymore.

So people's income is determined by how many savings and investments they had, particularly investments in AI that they had around the point at which humans stopped being able to do useful work.

So it could lead to a lot of inequality.

But it's like setting that aside.