Introducing Intelligence Age

“Will it be sufficient… to trust these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power?” —James Madison, Federalist No. 48

It is our pleasure to launch Intelligence Age, the blog of OpenAI’s new Strategic Futures team. We are a small team with the collective goal of answering one overarching question: how should free society be restructured to preserve individual rights and agency while accommodating the emergence of transformative AI?

Questions like this are sometimes referred to as concentration of power risks within the broader AI safety and policy community. Our team is founded on the idea that, in the long run, this category of risk is the largest, most serious, and most conceptually challenging to address. Why?

Striking this balance will require clear-eyed thinking about the reality of this technology. A world in which any individual, however malicious, can trivially cause great harm to thousands or millions of other people is not a world which has struck the right balance of power. Yet neither have we struck the right balance of power if individuals lack broad access and control over almost all aspects of the tools they use to express their freedom. No one company or oligopoly should determine or control the economy or the basic architecture of human society.

But perhaps no longer. Advancements in real-world autonomous systems may soon mean that states will be able to project force—domestically and internationally—without relying on cooperative soldiers or police officers. And advancements in machine intelligence may mean that the state can collect the revenue it needs not from the fruit of individual human labor, but from the outputs of data centers. The operation of the bureaucracy itself, too, could be largely automated. Power may therefore no longer require a society-wide bargain to be sustained, and the people, broadly conceived, may have only a small seat at the negotiating table, or perhaps none at all.

The modern state is the product of a long, uneven process of bargaining between various centers of power, such as the owners of capital and commodities, the wielders of political power, and the people. Most fundamentally, political and military power has rested on labor . To hold political power is to possess the monopoly on legitimate force. For all of human history, that monopoly has consisted of soldiers and what we today call “police,” along with a vast civil-military bureaucracy—complemented, to be sure, by many technological tools, but fundamentally operated by human beings whose support was needed to sustain the operation. And the whole apparatus—the soldiers, the tools, the attendant bureaucracy—was funded by taxes collected from the wages or production of human beings who had to be willing to pay. Power, at the core, has depended upon the large-scale cooperation and consent of many human beings. David Hume verbalized this often-implicit assumption succinctly when he observed that political leaders have “nothing to support them but [popular] opinion.”

Avoiding this outcome is fundamental to the preservation of human freedom. No amount of scientific discovery or technological progress or economic growth is worth the sacrifice of long-run individual autonomy this outcome would entail. Many of the anxieties that rightfully animate the nascent politics of AI relate to this question: Businesses, interest groups, and individuals alike all share the worry: “Will I lose my seat at the table?” To some extent, American politics in the 21st century has been shaped by similar concerns relating to individual and collective agency over the direction of the country and “who” the economy “is for.” AI raises the salience of these pre-existing concerns, appropriately so.

This is a structural problem that goes deeper than present-day partisan politics, and deeper even than the forms and rituals in which republican democracy is enacted today, sacred though those things may be to us. Humans can be on their way to disempowerment even if the routine of voting for our representatives is maintained. People can be deprived of agency even if a piece of parchment says that they are free.

At the dawn of the United States as a free nation, James Madison already knew that “parchment barriers” would not be sufficient to prevent tyranny. Like many of the Founders, his primary concern was avoiding the undue concentration of power.