“Our future depends upon what we choose to do and invest in. It is as if all of society is in vehicles navigating treacherous mountain passes with engines that are rapidly increasing in speed and power. If the drivers do not commensurately improve their ability to safely stay on the road through better, faster decision-making and with more-effective control systems in the cars, this will lead to catastrophe.
“The impact of AI depends on whether or not we invest ourselves in that decision-making and safety infrastructure. If we continue on our current course, advances in AI may take us down one of two possible paths toward a dystopian future:
- “The path of autocratic centralization, in which powerful corporations and authoritarian countries unilaterally control extraordinarily powerful AI systems.
- “The path of ungovernable decentralization, where everyone has unrestricted access to those incredibly powerful systems and, because there are no guardrails, their uses can – intentionally and/or unintentionally – come to cause massive, irreversible harm.
If we are able to bring to bear even one-tenth of the level of resources being invested in AI advances toward reinventing our democratic systems – along with improving the safety of AI systems and developing the necessary international agreements and regulations – we can bring the likelihood of a truly dystopian 2040 down to as low as 10%.
“Without extensive concerted effort far, far beyond that which we’ve seen to this point, the likelihood of us ending in these dystopian futures is extremely high, beyond 95%. That said, there is an alternative, a third path: The path of combined democratic centralization and democratic decentralization with an immediate acceleration of investment in the democratic infrastructure needed to make such a path viable is our best bet.
“I believe that if we are able to bring to bear even one-tenth of the level of resources being invested in AI advances toward reinventing our democratic systems – along with improving the safety of AI systems and developing the necessary international agreements and regulations – we can bring that likelihood of a truly dystopian 2040 down to as low as 10%.
“I share many more details about what it might look like for AI in my recent paper in the Journal of Democracy. A brief summary: ‘Reinventing our democratic infrastructure is critically necessary and also possible. Four interconnected and accelerating democratic paradigm shifts illustrate the potential: representative deliberations, AI augmentation, democracy-as-a-service and platform democracy.
“Such innovations provide a viable path toward not just reimagining traditional democracies but enabling the transnational and even global democratic processes critical for addressing the broader challenges posed by destabilizing AI advances – including those related to AI alignment and global agreements. We can and must rapidly invest in such democratic innovation if we are to ensure our democratic capacity increases with our power.’”
This essay was written in November 2023 in reply to the question: Considering likely changes due to the proliferation of AI in individuals’ lives and in social, economic and political systems, how will life have changed by 2040? This and more than 150 additional essay responses are included in the report “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence by 2040”