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my_research/superintelligence_can_cause_permanent_dictatorship.html
2026-01-04
Superintelligence can cause permanent dictatorship
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Written to persuade others, not for myself
This is quite obvious to me at this point, but sometimes even the obvious things need to be spelled out for other people. Hence this post.
Assume you had an AI that is slightly better (but not vastly better) than all humans at everything, and you managed to keep it in your control.
- If the AI is better than humans at operating the entire economy, including all mining operations, all industry, all supply chains, all service work, etc, then there is no need to hire humans for any of this.
- If the AI is better than humans at operating the entire government, including the police, the military and the executive, then there is no need to hire humans for any of this.
(When I say "better", I mean better along every axis, be it faster, cheaper, more reliable, higher quality etc)
Even at an intuitive level, without getting into details, this feels like the type of situation that devolves into a dictatorship. I don't understand why some people's intuitions don't point in this direction.
As a concrete example of what automated police looks like
- Imagine you are the dictator.
- Imagine there are a billion human policemen under you.
- Imagine they always follow your orders, and never disobey.
- Do you think this enables you to maintain your dictatorship indefinitely?
- Now imagine these are not human policemen but drones fitted with explosives. You can get a drone for $100 and a pound of TNT for $20, so this entire setup is affordable to most governments.
- Remember that most force is just projection. You don't actually need a billion, or even a million policemen on the street at any given moment, because most of the time you won't face millions of people on the street at once. Usually you will crush protests way before they reach big size. (And yes crushing protests can even mean literally killing all the protestors if required, that is the type of absolute power you have in this scenario.)
- Remember that the economy will also be fully automated, so if you think human workers striking can halt the economy, then that won't happen either.
- From the point of view of the dictator, humans are completely useless as a resource.
I think an ASI will probably figure out even better mechanisms of enforcement than manufacturing a billion drones, but you should imagine a billion drones as the bare minimum for how scary this scenario actually is
Transitioning from here to there
- You might argue that even though the end state of a dictatorship is stable, people today will coordinate to prevent that from happening. We might artifically distribute power between a bunch of people in the government (and maybe also in society), so that even if one person could in theory run everything using AI, he will not be allowed to.
- to do - I will write more on why the transition will be step by step, and every step of transition will feel inevitable and hard to fight against. Also remember that all the steps will come rapidly in quick succession, because AI capabilities will accelerate quickly within the timespan of years not decades. Normally, political events take atleast 5-10 years to happen, but AI capabilities might accelerate on timescales faster than that.
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