Three political positions that I think are severely underrated given the development of AGI: 1. @nathancofnas’ “hereditarian revolution” - the idea that the intellectual dominance of left-wing egalitarianism relies on group cognitive differences being taboo - is already very important. But existing group cognitive differences pale in comparison to the ones that will emerge between baseline humans and: - humans who leverage AI most effectively - humans with brain-computer interfaces - genetically engineered humans - AIs themselves Current cognitive differences already break politics; these will break it far more. So we need to be preparing for a future in which egalitarianism as an empirical thesis is (even more) obviously false. I don’t yet have a concise summary of the implications of this position. But at the very least I want a name for it. Awkwardly, we don’t actually have a good word for “anti-egalitarian”. Hereditarian is too narrow (as is hierarchist) and elitist has bad connotations. My candidate is “asymmetrist”. Egalitarianism tries to enforce a type of symmetry across the entirety of society. But our job will increasingly be to design societies where the absence of such symmetries is a feature not a bug. 2. Protectionism. Protectionism gets a bad rap, because global markets are very efficient. But they are very much not adversarially robust. If you are a small country and you open your borders to the currency, products and companies of a much larger country, then you will get short-term wealthier but also have an extremely hard time preventing that other country from gaining a lot of power over you in the long term. (As a historical example, trade was often an important precursor to colonial expansion. See also Amy Chua’s excellent book World on Fire, about how free markets enable some minorities to gain disproportionate power.) When you’re poor enough, or the larger power is benevolent enough, this may well be a good deal! But we’re heading towards a future in which a) most people become far wealthier in absolute terms due to AI-driven innovation, and b) AIs will end up wielding a lot of power in not-very-benevolent ways (e.g. automated companies that have been given the goal of profit-maximization). Given this, protectionism starts to look like a much better idea. The fact that it slows growth is not a problem, because society will already be reeling from the pace of change. And it lets you have much more control over the entities that are operating within your borders - e.g. you can monitor the use of AI decision-making within companies much more closely. To put it another way, in the future the entire human economy will be the “smaller country” that faces incursions by currency, products and companies under the control of AIs (or humans who have delegated power to AIs). Insofar as we want to retain control, we shouldn’t let people base those AIs in regulatory havens while still being able to gain significant influence over western countries. Okay, but won’t protectionist countries just get outcompeted? Not if they start off with enough power to deter other countries from deploying power-seeking AIs. And right now, the world’s greatest manufacturing power is already fairly protectionist. So if the US moves in that direction too, it seems likely that the combined influence of the US and China will be sufficient to prevent anyone else from “defecting”. The bottleneck is going to be trust between the two superpowers. (Continued in tweet below.)