My understanding is that most people who dislike capitalism dislike multiple features of it, features that are not downstream of one single variable to be optimized.
So if you break up the wealth concentration effect, you are reducing dissatisfaction overall, but you are also reducing the likelihood of any future alteration to any number of more minor dissatisfactions that seem characteristic of this system — e.g., the way it makes people's lives repetitive, predictable, robotic; the way it often preferentially rewards behaviors that service medium-term goals rather than ultra-short or ultra-long term goals; the way it reduces the dimensionality of the activities that are needed, from the average individual, and the way this reduction of dimensions along which one might be needed can make a person feel less like a person, etc.
I do not myself agree with anti-capitalists that all these patterns are best explained in terms of capital. You see similar tendencies correlated with, for example, most any attempt to scale culture. My point is just that the people who are trying to formulate the grandiose complaint are, deep down, generally not trying to designate as evil some single feature (even if they have latched onto that feature as being strategically their best line of attack); generally, I think, they are not saying, "Man, I see this nose everywhere and am sick of this nose," they are saying, "Why is it that people seem to be looking increasingly similar?" which sentiment (however flawed statistically) we expert statisticians might charitably translate as, "Why is it that there seems increasingly to be a single stable equilibrium for an increasing number of the increasingly divided planes of our diminishing existence?"
And maybe that last formulation is also empirically incorrect — but isn't there a general thrust in it that you recognize? "One default, one optimal path and anything I do to get out of it is either wasteful or imitated until it is the rule." Can you come up with a tax policy that will break up the concentration effect at that level? Maybe you can. Would it really break up the monoculture, or would it strengthen it? I don't know. I suppose reformers and revolutionaries have always diverged at this juncture.
> In many senses, yes. But the empowered ones still needed to keep most of the rest of the people happy and healthy enough to work, most of the time. That's what we're saying will change.
One of Western society's glaring cognitive dissonances: the conviction that "keeping people happy and healthy enough to work" is empowering them. Even assuming that the word "empowering" makes sense; even assuming that we can make sense of the notion of an authority "empowering" someone (which I personally cannot).
Directionally agree with rhelz but would push it further: any technique, even those which may have preceded agriculture, already does all the things you're claiming AI is going to do. Even a procedure entirely implemented by humans can keep its weighting of any unwanted form of "human input" beneath any epsilon.
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> 2. There are effectively two ways these systems maintain their alignment: through explicit human actions (like voting and consumer choice), and implicitly through their reliance on human labor and cognition. The significance of the implicit alignment can be hard to recognize because we have never seen its absence.
> 3. If these systems become less reliant on human labor and cognition, that would also decrease the extent to which humans could explicitly or implicitly align them. As a result, these systems—and the outcomes they produce—might drift further from providing what humans want.
You talk about empowerment, but many of your arguments seem oriented toward alignment. Voting and consumer choice may indeed be techniques for aligning (and thereby binding and scaling) society (i.e., a given group of people), but they have very little ability to "empower" any given individual. The power of the individual voice literally decreases in proportion to the success of these techniques (i.e., in proportion to the growth of those groups of humans which compose them). In other words, your "explicit" techniques are alignment techniques and have little to do with empowerment.
Your "implicit" category (labor, cognition, etc.), on the other hand, does seem to me to be oriented toward something like individual power. Unlike voting and market-making, labor and cognition do seem to be (or can naively be viewed as being) oriented more toward something like our everyday notion of individual power than they are toward these notions of social "alignment" and top-down "techniques of empowerment." That is, without much mental gymnastics, we can imagine labor, cognition, etc., as coming from within the individual and radiating outward — which is probably as good a criterion of power (individuality, sentience, free will, subjectivity, ego, humanity, etc.) as we're ever going to get.
You seem to be claiming that AI is a relatively new threat to this category of "implicitly empowering forces." This is where you're going to lose the brighter minds in your audience. Because has there ever been a more dominant and monotonous trend in human society than the reduction of the dimensionality of human labor and cognition, the reduction of the degrees of freedom in which the human mind and body can play? Almost by definition, almost as the criterion for its existence, a society attempts to make itself less dependent on each of its individual components. So, in a society composed of humans, what would be a fairer mechanism for dissolving these snowflake dependencies than the invention or discovery of techniques by which to make the system as a whole less dependent on any possible human input?