“Deep Democracy as a promising target for positive AI futures” by tylermjohn

If you want the long-term future to go well by the lights of a certain value function, you might be tempted to try to align AGI(s) to your own values (broadly construed, including your deliberative values and intellectual temperaments).[1]

Suppose that you're not going to do that, for one of three reasons:

1. You can't. People more powerful than you are going to build AGIs and you don't have a say over that.
2. You object to aligning AGI(s) to your own values for principled reasons. It would be highly uncooperative, undemocratic, coercive, and basically cartoon supervillain evil.
3. You recognize that this behaviour would, when pursued by lots of people, lead to a race to the bottom where everyone fights to build AGI aligned to their values as fast as possible and destroys a ton of value in the process, so you want to strongly reject this kind of norm.

[...]

---

First published:

August 20th, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TQFHWm4vq6aaEipHm/deep-democracy-as-a-promising-target-for-positive-ai-futures

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.