In SF this week, I met an online friend in person for the first time yesterday. We talked about super-persuasion. His take was: there is mostly an efficient market for power, and the world is reactive. Unlike software, humans adapt to new exploits or even just unexplained strange happenings. Society resists, pushes back. Unlike an instance of FreeBSD, it is not fine one minute then pwned the next. My reply was just to point to powerful historical figures and say, "if he could do it so can an ASI!"

That is, if an AI wants to acquire power it should be able to choose a human proxy - or more realistically a portfolio of human proxies - and help them take over a nation. I don't expect it to happen this way, as I imagine there are far quicker paths, but we know it is possible because humans have done it.

There are arguments against this. If I give the examples of Hitler or Lenin or Bonaparte, one might reply that they didn't really fully take over. There was still a political economy they worked within. Their actions were constrained by other agents. I don't think this is [...]

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