I’ve been thinking about an interesting parallel between political power and artificial superintelligence (ASI). In politics, powerful leaders often surround themselves with highly capable people, sometimes even people who are smarter than they are. Yet they manage to maintain control through various forms of leverage: political influence, financial dependencies, career opportunities, or sometimes even compromising information (kompromat). The interesting principle here is that you don’t necessarily need to be smarter than someone to maintain power over them. You just need control over something they value or depend on. Now consider a future where humans create an artificial superintelligence that is vastly more capable than its creators. What could serve as an equivalent form of leverage over such an intelligence? Would controlling computational resources, energy, or physical infrastructure be sufficient? Or would a sufficiently intelligent AI eventually find ways around these dependencies? More fundamentally, could we ever maintain a credible form of leverage over an entity that understands our strategies better than we do? I’m particularly interested in this from a game-theoretical and political perspective, rather than simply the traditional AI alignment problem. Is it possible to maintain power over an intelligence superior to your own, and if so, what would that power actually be based on? submitted by /u/cornflow
Originally posted by u/cornflow on r/ArtificialInteligence