Introducing AI Futures

What happened

”—James Madison, Federalist No. 48 It is our pleasure to launch AI Futures, the blog of OpenAI’s new Strategic Futures team. We are a small team with the collective goal of answering one overarching question: how should free society be restructured to preserve individual rights and agency while accommodating the emergence of transformative AI?

People can be deprived of agency even if a piece of parchment says that they are free. At the dawn of the United States as a free nation, James Madison already knew that “parchment barriers” would not be sufficient to prevent tyranny. Like many of the Founders, his primary concern was avoiding the undue concentration of power. But that did not mean that the Founders favored radical decentralization of power.

Instead, they modeled the balance of power using metaphors drawn from the best science of their day—that of Newtonian mechanics. America’s founding documents, mirroring the language and logic of gravity, are replete with references to “orbits” and “spheres” and the “attractive” impulses of one thing toward another.

A solar system is not a maximally decentralized assemblage of rocks; it consists of moons that orbit planets that in turn orbit a central sun.

They believed that people and organizations had tendencies toward power-seeking, just as celestial bodies had predictable tendencies of motion and attraction; and that avoiding undue concentration of power required understanding the mechanics of those tendencies, such that they would be set in motion against one another.

Why it matters

Questions like this are sometimes referred to as concentration of power risks within the broader AI safety and policy community. Our team is founded on the idea that, in the long run, this category of risk is the largest, most serious, and most conceptually challenging to address. Why?

The modern state is the product of a long, uneven process of bargaining between various centers of power, such as the owners of capital and commodities, the wielders of political power, and the people. Most fundamentally, political and military power has rested on labor. To hold political power is to possess the monopoly on legitimate force.

For all of human history, that monopoly has consisted of soldiers and what we today call “police,” along with a vast civil-military bureaucracy—complemented, to be sure, by many technological tools, but fundamentally operated by human beings whose support was needed to sustain the operation.

And the whole apparatus—the soldiers, the tools, the attendant bureaucracy—was funded by taxes collected from the wages or production of human beings who had to be willing to pay. Power, at the core, has depended upon the large-scale cooperation and consent of many human beings. ” But perhaps no longer.

Advancements in real-world autonomous systems may soon mean that states will be able to project force—domestically and internationally—without relying on cooperative soldiers or police officers. And advancements in machine intelligence may mean that the state can collect the revenue it needs not from the fruit of individual human labor, but from the outputs of data centers. The operation of the bureaucracy itself, too, could be largely automated.

Power may therefore no longer require a society-wide bargain to be sustained, and the people, broadly conceived, may have only a small seat at the negotiating table, or perhaps none at all. Avoiding this outcome is fundamental to the preservation of human freedom. No amount of scientific discovery or technological progress or economic growth is worth the sacrifice of long-run individual autonomy this outcome would entail.

” AI raises the salience of these pre-existing concerns, appropriately so. This is a structural problem that goes deeper than present-day partisan politics, and deeper even than the forms and rituals in which republican democracy is enacted today, sacred though those things may be to us. Humans can be on their way to disempowerment even if the routine of voting for our representatives is maintained.

What to watch

The aim of the Founders, then, was not to avoid all concentration of power, but too much of it, by checking power against power, and ambition against ambition. Today, we might use words like “incentives” and phrases like “game theory” to describe the same basic underlying dynamics.

Similarly, the answer to the structural challenge posed by advanced machine intelligence to free society is likely not the most radical decentralization of power imaginable. Instead, it is seeking to establish and preserve the right balance of power, such that no single actor, or small set of actors, can dominate the rest. Striking this balance will require clear-eyed thinking about the reality of this technology.