With the advent of AGI / AI experts, comes a new hard choice we have to make. How do we continue to govern ourselves. No one is very happy with the way D.C. is running things right now and at some point we have to discuss the question, maybe AI will be better? At some point, AI will be able to do everything better than us.. but they can't run the government better than our current politicians? Hmm…
For those Foundation fan's out there, Demarzel has infinite wisdom, experience, and no “self wants/desires.” She can’t own property. She is designed and programmed to serve mankind. Ya someone will argue "well what if they go off the rails". This is an cheap argument that can be applied to ALL AI systems (including self driving cars, but you won't hesitate to get in a Waymo!). I understand today's AI is not ready to take on very difficult problems *yet* (to quote Markel), but it will within 100 years. At that point, we will use AI for everything.
Why would it be the case that we trust AI to drive us around, order inventory, teach our children, trade our stock, write contracts, and diagnose disease, but we wouldn’t trust it to run major chunks of our government / write and pass legislation (like what’s a good effective tax rate for businesses, what foods / drugs should be illegal, how much to spend on roads, armies, and bridges)? But we trust our current politicians to do so?
As the Gini index continues to get worse, democracy continues to turn to socialism, which continues to erode the democracy itself until we go bankrupt. I believe Charlie Munger was right that democracy ends when the population realizes they can "vote themselves all the money". Mandani’s government-owned grocery stores / “reinventing bread lines” is only going to be more common if we don't start to think outside the box.
If given the choice, I would give a lot of that responsibility to AI even today, let alone with 100 years of AI progress.