Direct democracies exist. We have actually ended up in a situation where "one person one vote" is really surprisingly close to the reality of how we govern humanity.
Not by the benevolence of the butcher, but because of the self-interest of liberal and (mostly) Western governments. In our current regime, human labor and intellectual output are simply too economically valuable to waste, meaning types of government that maximally allow them to flourish (liberal, constitutional, broadly capitalistic) get an edge, small at first but compounding over time to become decisive. But it's not logically required for this to continue into the future.[1]
I don't claim to have a complete model here, of course. "Where do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from?" seems relevant, to an extent.
But consider this as an illustrative example: the US famously implemented PNTR with China in 1999 and supported China's accession into the WTO a couple of years later. Beyond economic matters and the benefits of greater abundance and lower prices, proponents of these moves, such as President Clinton and House Speaker Hastert, argued increased trade and development would expose China to the wealth and prosperity of the West. When confronted with Western culture and the superiority of its living standards, China's population would demand genuine democracy alongside "decent labor standards, a cleaner environment, human rights and the rule of law."
And people mostly believed Clinton and Hastert! Their arguments really caught on. Indeed, people at the time looked at Japan and (especially) South Korea as examples of their thesis being proven correct. But as Matt Yglesias ably explained:
This idea that trade, development, and democratization would all move together was always controversial. But from what I can remember of the debates at the time, even the sharpest critics of trade with China underestimated exactly how wrong Clinton would be about this.
For starters, it proved much easier on a technical level to censor the internet than I think non-technical people realized 20 to 25 years ago. But what’s worse is that modern technology, especially since the growth of the smartphone industry, is basically a huge surveillance machine. In the west, that machine is basically used for targeted advertising, which can sometimes feel “creepy” but that I don’t think has a ton of real downsides. But in the People’s Republic of China, it’s been used to craft a more intrusive authoritarian state than the worst dictators of the 20th century could have dreamed of.
It was precisely the rise of technology that empowered the few at the expense of the many, by breaking the feedback loop of reality -> citizens' beliefs -> citizens' actions -> reality that had made "empowering the public" part of the government's self-interest if it wanted economic growth. In the past, China had had neither public empowerment nor economic prosperity.[2] Around the early 2000s, it was able to move towards the latter without needing the former.
1
Back in February, I attended the Bay Area EA Global as I have every year since they started having them. I didn't have a solid plan for what to do there this year, though, so I decided to volunteer. That means I only attended the sessions where I was on room duty, and otherwise spent the day having a few 1:1s when I wasn't on shift.
That's okay because, as everyone always says, the 1:1s are the best part of EA Global, and once again they were proven right.
Among the many great folks I met and friends I caught up with, I got the chance to meet Ronen Bar and learn about his idea of AI moral alignment. And when he told me about it, I was embarrassed I hadn't thought of it myself.
Simply put, moral alignment says that, rather than trying to align AI with human values, we try to explicitly align it to be a positive force for all sentient beings.
In all my years of thinking about AI alignment, I've not exactly ignored animals and other creatures both known and unknown, but I also figured they'd get brought along because humans care about them. But I have to admit, while it might come to the same outcome, it feels more authentic to say I want AI that is aligned to all beings rather than just humans because I, though I may be human, do in fact care about the wellbeing of all life and wish for all of it to flourish as it best can with the aid of future AI technology.
I think I missed articulating an idea like moral alignment because I was too close to the ideas. That is, I understood intuitively that if we succeeded in building AI aligned with human flourishing, that would necessarily mean alignment with the flourishing of all life, and in fact I've said that the goal of building aligned AI is to help life flourish, but not that AI should be aligned to all life directly. Now that we are much closer to building artificial superintelligence and need to figure out how to align it, the importance of aligning to non-human life stands out to me as a near-term priority.
For example, I can imagine us building human-aligned AI that ignores the plight of factory farmed animals, the suffering of shrimp, and the pain of bugs because lots of humans don't seem to care that much about their conditions. Such an AI would perhaps not be perfectly aligned in the ideal way we originally imagined aligned AI would be, but it would certainly be a kind of alignment with human goals, and it would be a travesty for the non-human beings it left out.
So let's not do that. Let's figure out how to align AI so that it's not just good for a few people or even all people, but so that it's good for all beings everywhere.
Cross-posted from my blog, Uncertain Updates.