The plausibility of this depends on exactly what the culture of the elite is. (In general, I would be interested in knowing what all the different elite cultures in the world actually are.) I can imagine there being some tendency toward thinking of the poor / “low-merit”, as being superfluous, but I can also imagine superrich people not being that extremely elitist and thinking “why not? The world is big, let the undeserving live.” or even things which are more humane than that.
But also, despite whatever humaneness there might be in the elite, I can see there being Molochian pressures to discard humans. Can Moloch be stopped? (This seems like it would be a very important thing to accomplish, if tractable.) If we could solve international competition (competition between elite cultures who are in charge of things), then nations could choose to not have the most advanced economies they possibly could, and thus could have a more “pro-slack” mentality.
Maybe AGI will solve international competition? I think a relatively simple, safe alignment for an AGI , would be for one that was the servant of humans—but which ones? Each individual? Or the elites who currently represent them? If the elites, then it wouldn’t automatically stop Moloch. But otherwise it might.
(Or the AGI could respect the autonomy of humans and let them have whatever values they want, including international competition, which may plausibly be humanity’s “revealed preference”.)
The plausibility of this depends on exactly what the culture of the elite is. (In general, I would be interested in knowing what all the different elite cultures in the world actually are.) I can imagine there being some tendency toward thinking of the poor / “low-merit”, as being superfluous, but I can also imagine superrich people not being that extremely elitist and thinking “why not? The world is big, let the undeserving live.” or even things which are more humane than that.
But also, despite whatever humaneness there might be in the elite, I can see there being Molochian pressures to discard humans. Can Moloch be stopped? (This seems like it would be a very important thing to accomplish, if tractable.) If we could solve international competition (competition between elite cultures who are in charge of things), then nations could choose to not have the most advanced economies they possibly could, and thus could have a more “pro-slack” mentality.
Maybe AGI will solve international competition? I think a relatively simple, safe alignment for an AGI , would be for one that was the servant of humans—but which ones? Each individual? Or the elites who currently represent them? If the elites, then it wouldn’t automatically stop Moloch. But otherwise it might.
(Or the AGI could respect the autonomy of humans and let them have whatever values they want, including international competition, which may plausibly be humanity’s “revealed preference”.)