Seb Krier

I think this is spot on. The most useful work in the coming years will be about leveraging AI to help improve and reform liberal democracy, the rule of law, separation of powers, free speech, coordination, and constitutional safeguards.

One heuristic I have for AI is: if somone can instantiate their preference or desire really easily, if principal agent problems are materially reduced, if you can no longer rely on inefficiency or bloat as indirect hedge – then the ‘rules of the game’ matter more than ever.

These are all very difficult questions with or without AI. And I’m concerned with two things in particular: first, the easy appeal of anti-elite populism – people who just think ‘well let’s have vetocracy everywhere, let’s leverage the emotions of the masses for short term gain’.

And second, the appeal of scheme-y behaviour – instrumental convergence for political operators. This is harder to pin down, but basically a variant of “I want goal X, so anything that gets me closer to this goal is good” – what leads to all sorts of bad policy and unsavoury alliances.

And instead of trying to 4D chess it or try to recreate politics from first principles, I think technologists should actively enage with experts in all sorts of discplines: constitutional scholars, public choice economists, game theorists etc. Converesely, many of these experts should engage with technologists more instead of coping with obsolete op-eds about how AI is fake or something.

Lastly, improved AI capabilities means you can now use these systems for more things than you could have before. I couldn’t write software a year ago and now I can create a viable app in a day. This dynamic will continue, and will reward people who are agentic and creative.

Are you a local councillor? Well now you have 1000 agents at your disposal – what can you now that that was otherwise unthinkable? Are you someone who lives in their district? Now you have even better tools to hold them to account. Are you an academic? Great, now consider how the many bylaws, rules, structures, institutions, incentives are messing up incentives and progress, what should be improved, and how to get streamlined coordination rather than automated obstruction.

Here is the link.  Here is the related Dean Ball tweet.