Job loss could also strip people of political power

Transcript

From the transcript The Diary Of A CEO publishes with the episode.

1. 1:34:27

   it's going to be rough. And hopefully we can navigate that well. We think that at a high level, people need to have money and also people need to have power. And I think these are like somewhat different things. It's like, why are jobs important? Well, there's a lot of reasons why jobs are important, but I think the main ones are, well, it's how people get money so they can survive and get the things that they want by buying the things that they want. So if people are going to be losing their jobs, you need some other way of people getting money.

2. 1:34:51

   And then there's also the power thing, which is that right now people have political power in part due to their economic power. People can threaten to go on strike, for example, or, you know, countries that are ruled by dictators can't. just completely genocide an entire subpopulation. Or they can, but it's costly for them to do so because then they'll have less money because that subpopulation is contributing to their economy and contributing tax revenue and so forth. But if you end up in a world where actually nobody's contributing tax revenue except for the AI companies and the robot companies, then you, the government, are less incentivized to care about what...

3. 1:35:30

   you know, the common people think. So when people lose their jobs, they're not just threatened with loss of income, they're also threatened with loss of political power. And so we think that it's important to like do things to push against that. What does that look like? How do people have power in such a world? Well, in democracies, at least, they still have votes. Okay. So I think that it's very important for there to be regulations on the use of AI that help make the public discourse more sane and more actually giving the people what is in their interest and what they want and avoiding a sort of opposite outcome where, you know, the masses are easily manipulated by AI-powered media, for example, or where everyone's talking all day to their AI advisors and the AI advisors are like subtly steering them away from voting for the candidate that would

4. 1:36:27

   not be what the AI companies want because the AI companies have this other candidate that they like better and they're like secretly biasing their AIs to like steer people towards voting for that candidate right so so we want to be in a situation where um people have AIs that are actually trustworthy and that are truth-seeking AIs honest AIs and that don't have any sort of like political agendas put into them by the AI companies or by the government you know you want to avoid a situation where the AI company where the government has issued some sort of secret order that like The AIs have to be such and such a way. You know, the Department of War dispute versus Anthropic is like an interesting sort of foreshadowing of this, right? Where Anthropic was giving their AIs to the Department of War. The Department of War wanted to use them for certain things and was upset that Anthropic's AIs were like not supposed to be used for those things. That things in particular were domestic surveillance and autonomous robots. Mm-hmm.

5. 1:37:24

   There's going to be a lot more issues like that coming up, and you want it to be the case that people know what they're getting, and that if people are spending hours a day talking to their chatbot, that chatbot doesn't have political biases put into it or a secret agenda or things like that, and instead has been trained to give honest, true answers to things. And I think if you can do that, it can improve the discourse and help people to use their votes to put even better regulations and even better politicians in place and so forth. And you can sort of potentially bootstrap this to having something where people are people's power is even more secure than it is today. A lot of the stuff we've covered in part, so, you know, the wars and drones and missiles, we're already seeing this around the world at the moment, which is really, really interesting. And we've talked about robots outnumbering humans as well, which is part of this prediction. Some of the ones down here I found to be really curious, which is people will be protected by AIs wherever they go. Yeah. In this scenario, they delay the creation of superintelligence until 2040.