Import AI 451: Political superintelligence; Google's society of minds, and a robot drummer

Import AI 451: Political superintelligence; Google's society of minds, and a robot drummer Are there any genies that can be put back in the bottle? Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. AI might let us build “political superintelligence”: …But turning this into a societal upside requires lots of intentional work… As AI systems get more powerful and broaden their real world impact from coding to other domains, it seems likely that they could also become useful for helping people advocate for themselves in politics, and helping politicians better craft policy. But getting to a world where a “political superintelligence” exists and helps us is a lot more challenging than just building better AI systems, according to Andy Hall, a political economy professor at Stanford. “AI is like the printing press, to a point. Instead of making information cheap and easily available, it makes intelligence cheap and easily available. That is, it not only serves users information, but it can find it for them, analyze it for them, and help them convert it into understanding,” Hall writes. “The more I work with and study AI, the more I believe it can give every human being on the planet access to a sort of political superintelligence, if we shape it right.” What is a political superintelligence? By this, Hall means AI systems which allow people to have “tools that help citizens, representatives, and institutions perceive reality more sharply, understand tradeoffs, contest power, and act more effectively”. A political superintelligence spans both the AI companies that build the technology, the technology itself, and the institutions and people which the technology interacts with. “I’m not interested in slowing AI down. I’m interested in speeding up how we build the structures that keep us free as AI gets more powerful,” Hall writes. Three layers for political superintelligence: Hall sees political superintelligence as being composed of three distinct layers. The information layer: “AI can massively change how governments access and understand data, identify problems, hear from citizens, and distribute services”. Though getting to this future will require better evaluations for how AI systems behave when it comes to the sorts of information governments might be interested in, and it’ll require people to build AI tools directly for policymakers. The representation layer: “Political superintelligence might help solve this monitoring problem by giving each of us a tireless, automated delegate always serving us in the political sphere,” he writes. “These AI delegates could monitor politics for us and suggest how to vote—or even serve as policymakers alongside human supervisors.” Building this layer requires us to ensure that agents can reliably act on our behalf, that they aren’t swayed by adversarial prompting (imagine how politicians might fund campaigns explicitly designed to sway the beliefs of agents working on behalf of people). It may also be important to re-think agent ownership - what happens if a particular policy choice goes…