Power is already concentrated today: over 800 million people live on less than $3 a day, the three richest men in the world are worth over $1 trillion, and almost six billion people live in countries without free and fair elections.

This is a problem in its own right. There is still substantial distribution of power though: global income inequality is falling, over two billion people live in electoral democracies, no country earns more than a quarter of GDP, and no company earns as much as 1%.

But in the future, advanced AI could enable much more extreme power concentration than we’ve seen so far.

Many believe that within the next decade the leading AI projects will be able to run millions of superintelligent AI systems thinking many times faster than humans. These systems could displace human workers, leading to much less economic and political power for the vast majority of people; and unless we take action to prevent it, they may end up being controlled by a tiny number of people, with no effective oversight. Once these systems are deployed across the economy, government, and the military, whatever goals they’re built to have will become the primary force shaping the future. If those goals are chosen by the few, then a small number of people could end up with the power to make all of the important decisions about the future.

This article by Rose Hadshar explores this emerging challenge in detail. You can see all the images and footnotes in the original article on the 80,000 Hours website.

Chapters:

• Introduction (00:00)
• Summary (02:15)
• Section 1: Why might AI-enabled power concentration be a pressing problem? (07:02)
• Section 2: What are the top arguments against working on this problem? (45:02)
• Section 3: What can you do to help? (56:36)

Narrated by: Dominic Armstrong
Audio engineering: Dominic Armstrong and Milo McGuire
Music: CORBIT