Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:
It may seem counterintuitive that human interests can be served by having AIs in positions of control. But I think the counterintuitiveness comes from a nationalist outlook where ‘the State is the highest expression of the life of a people’, and the role of leadership is for someone of your own ethnic group to be the leader so you can feel good about being on top.
The liberal outlook is that the state exists to help individuals fulfill their goals. At the risk of desacralizing the state a little more than I mean to, it’s a service provider, dispensing coordination, public order, redistribution, and other good things. It’s fine to automate service providers. If robot garbagemen are safer and cleaner than humans, we’ll eventually automate trash collection; if robot legislators provide coordination, order, etc better than we do, we should automate that too. Every vision of the utopian future agrees we will have robot servants. And the president, they tell us, is merely a public servant. Why should he alone be exempt from the vision?
To help make this counterintuitive idea more concrete, I’ll discuss five proposals for what this might look like, from weakest to strongest.
More here.
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