On 20 August OpenAI put up AI Futures, the blog of a new Strategic Futures team, with a first post by Dean Ball carrying an unusual note at the top: these are the author's views, not the organisation's.
The question it sets itself is neither alignment nor jobs. It is how a free society should be restructured so that individuals keep their rights and their agency once transformative AI arrives — what the field files under concentration of power risks.
⚖️ The argument runs through history rather than benchmarks. Political power has always rested on human beings — soldiers, police, clerks — and on taxes collected from human labour. Ball quotes Hume: rulers have "nothing to support them but [popular] opinion." Consent was never a courtesy, it was load-bearing.
Autonomous systems remove the load. A state that can project force without willing soldiers, fund itself from data-centre output rather than wages, and run its bureaucracy on machines no longer needs a society-wide bargain at all. Madison's "parchment barriers" would be all that is left.
🤔 An AI lab publishing the sharpest case against concentrated power is either admirable candour or excellent positioning. The two are rarely in conflict 🎭
Next Move AI | #AI
