Episode #436: How AI Will Reshape Power, Governance, and What It Means to Be Human

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Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Rocco Miich here and he is AI ethics and alignment researcher. And we're also going to talk about ice colonization, but really interested to also dive into decentralized AI alignment. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Yeah. So where should we start? First? We got the ice colonization. I kind of want to go into decentralized AI alignment because there's probably a connection. Actually, let's start there. What is the connection between ice colonization and decentralized AI alignment?

That's a good question. That's a good question. So basically we're moving into an age where most likely AI is going to take over most of the work, most of the power, most of the productivity that humans currently do. And, you know, I mean, that's a big technological transition. Big technological transitions have big sociopolitical implications. Gunpowder is a prime example of this. In the world before gunpowder, a single medieval knight or champion with his armor and his sword could basically kill pretty much an unlimited number of peasants who didn't have armor and training. Then gunpowder came along and it became much more one to one. Like one man with a gun against 10, the one is going to lose. Even three against one. The one is potentially going to lose with that kind of technology. So it completely upended feudal Europe. It was. It was a sort of extinction level event for that sociopolitical system. And we're never going back to that. And I think that AI as it currently exists and as it's likely to exist in the next several decades or at least next 10 years, is probably going to completely upend the current sociopolitical system that's based around, you know, a middle upper class of knowledge workers, people basically people like us, are going to completely lose our livelihoods. And probably, you know, the lower middle class, the people who, you know, they drive taxis or they repair sinks or their plumbers or whatever, that. Those as well. So basically most human jobs that are associated with achieving some kind of goal, whether it's Writing a good article or, you know, driving somebody or fixing a toilet or anything like that. Those, those are gone, right? Those are finished. It's, it's like, you know, we've got maybe 10 years tops before 90% of those are completely gone. So there's going to be a new world and I think it's still largely up for grabs what that new world is going to look like. But it's, it's quite, you know, that there is potential for this new world to simply not have anything like us in it. Right. And they may still be humans, but they may be absolutely nothing like us. They may be as different from us as the sort of industrial revolution population was from the medieval world and as the medieval world was from the, you know, hunter gatherer world. Right. So I, I think there's a lot that's up for grabs in terms of trying to get the best out of this and avoid planning our own obsolescence.