80,000 Hours Podcast
Why automating human labour will break our political system | Rose Hadshar, Forethought
17 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Let me paint a picture of the sort of thing I am imagining could happen in a country like the United States.
Chapter 2: Who is Rose Hadshar and what is her background?
There are still elections.
Chapter 3: What are the three dynamics reshaping political power in the AI era?
The nominations for candidates for those elections are decided by small groups of people within political parties. Those are increasingly automated. They're automated by biased AI systems that are run by big tech companies. So the choice of candidates becomes candidates who approve of what the big tech companies are doing.
Meanwhile, the things that those candidates are offering to people are basically just versions of better state handouts. Nobody has a job. Everything comes down to what the state will offer you. The candidate who offers people the nicest material stops. wins. People are happy to go along with this because they're getting rich.
Chapter 4: How does AI empower small groups with immense productivity?
But what's happening behind the scenes is that a small group of oligarchs are deciding what the US's foreign policy should be, deciding what should be invested in and what shouldn't be, shaping the information environment, shaping people's ideological commitments. You might end up with really just a handful of people de facto controlling the political decisions that matter in the world.
Today, I am speaking with Rose Hadjar. Rose is a researcher at Forethought, and she recently wrote an article for the 80,000 Hours website, which spells out a variety of different ways that AI could enable really extreme power concentration.
So in one version of events, the US and eventually the world comes to be dominated by the executives of a single AI company whose AI quickly became just way more advanced than others through an intelligence explosion. Now, I'm pretty worried about AI concentrating power in the hands of a small number of people.
But when you spell out the details of a story like this, I do find that it can begin to feel a bit sci-fi. Like, wouldn't we just have checks and balances that prevent this from happening?
Chapter 5: What happens when a software update leads to a power grab?
And, you know, does believing in all of this require you to make some quite extreme assumptions about how fast or how intense intelligence explosion would be? So yeah, overall, I do feel quite unsure what to make of all of this. And I really want to push Rose for some answers and hopefully clarify some of my own confusions today. So Rose, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast.
Thanks for having me. I'm pleased to be here. Let's dive in and talk about the different ways that extreme power concentration might actually play out.
We had your colleague Tom Davidson on the show a while ago, and he and Rob Wiblin did this deep dive into AI-enabled power grabs, talking especially about military coups by actors using AI or people, in fact, creating their own army using their AI capabilities to take control.
Now, I think when you start thinking about how could AI help humans take over, these kinds of things, these sorts of active power grabs feel like the most obvious threats. But it seems, Rose, that you think that focusing only on these kind of power grab stories might miss or fail to address some of the other important ways that power could get severely concentrated.
Chapter 6: How might AI labor change the relationship between governments and citizens?
So yeah, can you start by telling us what other dynamics might need our attention here? Yeah, sure. So I definitely am very concerned about these military power grab style scenarios, but I'm also expecting that... A bunch of messier and more continuous dynamics, more continuous with today's world, will matter a lot for how concentrated power actually becomes.
So one of these dynamics is just economic factors, wealth. AI is going to be making some people extremely rich. Perhaps not one person or one company, maybe a whole sector, but still it's going to really reshape wealth distribution. And we see today that... wealth can be used to gain other kinds of power.
And so I think this will be one of the important factors that's feeding into who comes out on top and how extremely so. Then another factor that I think is really important here is epistemics. So this is our ability to understand what's going on, to make sense of the world around us. I like the thing you said at the beginning about checks and balances.
Shouldn't we expect, given that nobody really wants extreme power concentration, shouldn't we expect that it will be fine and that we'll all coordinate to stop it?
Chapter 7: In what ways could democracy persist in name but not in substance?
I think for me, the big worry is maybe society's ability to understand what's even happening will get eroded.
either by systemic factors like the pace of technological change is getting so fast that it becomes very difficult to understand what's happening, or because of active interference on the part of the powerful who are kind of deliberately obfuscating what's going on, deliberately creating confusion and distraction, deliberately undermining the tools that we use to make sense of what's happening.
So those are two other factors that I'm expecting to play
a significant part in how power concentration plays out I'm less imagining that power will become concentrated just through one of these routes and more thinking that things become much more dangerous when there's a combination of these things which might include power grabs could be multiple power grabs you know over different organizations or at different times but I'm expecting that how epistemics plays out and where the money goes will matter a lot for this too and I'm kind of most worried about scenarios where you have some of all of these dynamics going on
Right. Okay. So there are at least three kinds of dynamics that seem worrying. One is active power grabs. One is the way that the distribution of wealth gets reshaped and these other economic factors. And one is this sort of broad category of things you're calling epistemics, like our ability to sort of make sense of things and predict what might happen next and react appropriately and so forth.
And these things interact in complex ways and seems most likely to you that there'll be some degree of all of these things going on in worlds where power gets extremely concentrated. I think it would be helpful if you could make this a bit more vivid by telling a story where you do get some combination of these dynamics and they lead to really extreme concentration of power.
Yeah, I'll give it a go. So one kind of illustrative scenario, the sort of thing I'm worried about is AI progress gets faster and faster. Some actors, maybe a mixture of AI companies, chip supply chain companies, the governments that house those companies, some actors start to become much more capable than everybody else as their AI gets better. I think a good way of thinking about this is...
Because it sounds a bit like maybe, oh, that's just, you know, it's like they're better at making nuclear power stations or some other technology. I think it's really not. I think a good intuition pump for this is imagining that AI systems are kind of equivalent to human workers.
These companies might be fielding millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of very efficient human workers that are working 24-7. We can think of this as some companies 10x in size or 100x in size and other companies stay the same because they don't have access to AI systems like that.
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Chapter 8: What interventions could prevent extreme power concentration?
I mean, that all sounds pretty bleak. Um, and yeah, quite, quite extreme as well. And I think this is where I like begin to get a bit confused because I think that some of the dynamics that you've been describing are quite familiar. So like, yeah, in today's world, big companies do like wield a fair amount of political influence and, um,
that political influence and wealth can feed into an increased ability to manipulate public opinion and so forth. We have issues with misinformation and a sort of polluted information environment. Those things already exist.
We've also sort of seen, yeah, like previous waves of automation, concentrating wealth and concentrating power into the hands of different people or smaller groups of people in the past. Like I think in the industrial revolution, as we industrialized, the wealth sort of maybe fell more to the factory owners and so forth, who are most kind of important to the economy at the time.
So all of these things feel like kind of familiar, like not that far from things that we've already seen. And we also have current AIs that seem pretty capable and they haven't kind of shaken things up that much. none of these dimensions feel like they're obviously much worse than they were before.
So I think with all of that, I do wonder why we might get effects with future AIs that are just so much more extreme than we've seen previously and even with current AI systems. Yeah, so first of all, I completely agree with you. This would be way more extreme than anything we've seen in the past. And so it's definitely a prediction of something very different happening.
I also think if I knew that current systems would not advance at all, and we would stay at this level of AI capabilities forever, I wouldn't be very concerned about extreme power concentration. I'd be concerned about moderate power concentration. I think we can already see today, oh, there are some companies that have a lot of influence.
But I think it would be within the same kind of range as we've seen historically, rather than something unprecedented. On why I think AI is going to be different, I think a core thing here is I'm expecting AI will eventually be able to automate most or all human work in a way that no other technology has been able to do.
And a key thing here is it's going to massively reduce the leverage of the average human person. Right now, humans all have labor that they can sell. This can't be taken away from them. I mean, they can be locked up, but it's a non-seizable, valuable good that humans have.
And I'm imagining a future where, in fact, anything economically valuable can be done via AI systems without any humans involved. And I think this is the kind of main generator for the thought, oh, maybe power will become very concentrated because maybe most people won't have anything valuable to hold out as leverage. To get a bit more specific about how that might work, I think...
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