I guess the distinction between unipolar and multipolar sort of depends on the level of abstraction at which something is viewed. For example, the USA is normally thought of as a single actor, but it’s composed of 330 million individual human agents, each with different values, which is a highly multipolar situation. Likewise, I suppose you could have lots of AIs with somewhat different values, but if they coordinated on an overarching governance system, that governance system itself could be considered unipolar.
Even a single person can be seen as sort of multipolar if you look at the different, sometimes conflicting emotions, intuitions, and reasoning within that person’s brain.
I was thinking the reason we care about the multipolar vs. unipolar distinction is that we are worried about conflict/cooperation-failure/etc. and trying to understand what kinds of scenarios might lead to it. So, I’m thinking we can define the distinction in terms of whether conflict/etc. is a significant possibility.
I agree that if we define it your way, multipolar takeoff is more likely than not.
Ok, cool. :) And as I noted, even if we define it my way, there’s ambiguity regarding whether a collection of agents should count as one entity or many. We’d be more inclined to say that there are many entities in cases where conflict between them is a significant possibility, which gets us back to your definition.
I guess the distinction between unipolar and multipolar sort of depends on the level of abstraction at which something is viewed. For example, the USA is normally thought of as a single actor, but it’s composed of 330 million individual human agents, each with different values, which is a highly multipolar situation. Likewise, I suppose you could have lots of AIs with somewhat different values, but if they coordinated on an overarching governance system, that governance system itself could be considered unipolar.
Even a single person can be seen as sort of multipolar if you look at the different, sometimes conflicting emotions, intuitions, and reasoning within that person’s brain.
I was thinking the reason we care about the multipolar vs. unipolar distinction is that we are worried about conflict/cooperation-failure/etc. and trying to understand what kinds of scenarios might lead to it. So, I’m thinking we can define the distinction in terms of whether conflict/etc. is a significant possibility.
I agree that if we define it your way, multipolar takeoff is more likely than not.
Ok, cool. :) And as I noted, even if we define it my way, there’s ambiguity regarding whether a collection of agents should count as one entity or many. We’d be more inclined to say that there are many entities in cases where conflict between them is a significant possibility, which gets us back to your definition.