AI takeover and human disempowerment
Adam Bales (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 9-2024, forthcoming in The Philosophical Quarterly
Some take seriously the possibility of AI takeover, where AI systems seize power in a way that leads to human disempowerment. Assessing the likelihood of takeover requires answering empirical questions about the future of AI technologies and the context in which AI will operate. In many cases, philosophers are poorly placed to answer these questions. However, some prior questions are more amenable to philosophical techniques. What does it mean to speak of AI empowerment and human disempowerment? And what empirical claims must hold for the former to lead to the latter? In this paper, I address these questions, providing foundations for further evaluation of the likelihood of takeover.
Other working papers
Funding public projects: A case for the Nash product rule – Florian Brandl (Stanford University), Felix Brandt (Technische Universität München), Dominik Peters (University of Oxford), Christian Stricker (Technische Universität München) and Warut Suksompong (National University of Singapore)
We study a mechanism design problem where a community of agents wishes to fund public projects via voluntary monetary contributions by the community members. This serves as a model for public expenditure without an exogenously available budget, such as participatory budgeting or voluntary tax programs, as well as donor coordination when interpreting charities as public projects and donations as contributions. Our aim is to identify a mutually beneficial distribution of the individual contributions. …
Three mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk – David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Longtermists have recently argued that it is overwhelmingly important to do what we can to mitigate existential risks to humanity. I consider three mistakes that are often made in calculating the value of existential risk mitigation: focusing on cumulative risk rather than period risk; ignoring background risk; and neglecting population dynamics. I show how correcting these mistakes pushes the value of existential risk mitigation substantially below leading estimates, potentially low enough to…
Longtermism in an Infinite World – Christian J. Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin) and Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The case for longtermism depends on the vast potential scale of the future. But that same vastness also threatens to undermine the case for longtermism: If the future contains infinite value, then many theories of value that support longtermism (e.g., risk-neutral total utilitarianism) seem to imply that no available action is better than any other. And some strategies for avoiding this conclusion (e.g., exponential time discounting) yield views that…