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Comment by avidiax | Hacker News Reader

Presumably, those with the levers of power in their hands will willingly do as the super-intelligence says. Particularly when they start being outcompeted by other powerful people that do as the super-intelligence says, they either serve the super-intelligence or become irrelevant.

Obviously, some powerful people face little competition, and super-intelligence is still limited by available information, so some people will be able to resist.

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You're talking about a government takeover of some sort and it doesn't seem to be happening so far. Governments are skeptical of AI firms.

I mean that, in theory, if you are a politician or CEO, and the AI has better ideas than you do, it would be stupid not to incorporate them, at least so far as they are compatible with your political brand. And similar down the chain to the staffers, lobbyists, etc.

One would expect that a super-intelligence would have great ideas given the available information, and would even be highly aligned with those leaders so long as the AI it told to keep the leader in power and expand their power.

Of course, some leaders won't want to consult the AI or won't follow the advice. If the AI is really super-intelligent, then we'd expect the politicians and leaders that do follow AI to eventually outcompete those that don't.

This all presumes that the super-intelligent AI is able to optimize for, e.g. political power and longevity, rather than "book smart" or "theoretically optimal".

This assumes that that there are excellent political suggestions that political advisors haven’t thought of already, and enough of them that an AI advisor would build up a history of usually being right in hindsight.

I’m not sure that’s possible. We often don’t know what the right move would have been, even in hindsight.

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