Scott Alexander

say that actually everything's fine and that everyone should listen to your orders.

That was Cortés' strategy and it actually worked.

And then Pizarro did the same thing and it worked with the Inca.

But also with Pizarro, his group ended up getting into a civil war in the middle of this whole thing.

And one of the most important battles of this whole campaign was between two Spanish forces fighting it out in front of the capital city of the Incas.

More generally, the history of European colonialism is like this, where the Europeans were like fighting each other intensely the entire time, both on the small scale within individual groups and then also at the large scale between countries.

And yet nevertheless, they were able to carve up the world and take over.

And so I do think this is not what we explore in the scenario, but I think it's entirely plausible that even if the AIs within an individual company are like in different factions, they might nevertheless overall end up quite poorly for humans.

Like by no doom, you mean no like misaligned AI doom?

That's right.

Yeah.

Even if you think the misalignment stuff is like not an issue, which many people think, there's still the constitution of power stuff.

And so I would strongly recommend that people get more engaged, think about what's coming, and try to steer things politically so that our ordinary liberal democracy continues to function and we still have like...

checks and balances and balances of power and stuff rather than this insane concentration in a single CEO or in maybe like two or three CEOs or in like the president, right?

Ideally, we want to have it so that like the legislature has a substantial amount of power over the spec, for example.

I love speculating, actually.

I'm happy to keep going.

But this is moving beyond the speculation we have done so far.

Our scenario ends with this stuff, but we haven't actually thought that much beyond.

Well, some of the concentration of power stuff I think might also help with this.