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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

> AGI escaping a sandbox is truly terrifying.

That's already happened. The AGI's are called corporations. Most governments have failed to regulate corporations successfully, and have been unable to keep them from becoming almost powerful enough to challenge governments.

The accelerationists for corporations were a group of economists, led by Milton Friedman, and a group of business leaders, organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In the 1970s and 1980s, they pushed the ideas that corporations are responsible only to their stockholders, and that government should not interfere with the concentration of corporate power. Those were not mainstream ideas of the 1930s to 1960s. The corporate accelerationists succeeded. That's when corporations escaped the sandbox.

Now that's an "alignment problem".

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Corporations are indeed a difficult alignment problem, as anyone who has tried to design an incentive scheme eventually realizes. But corporations are still composed of humans, beholden (if only loosely) to human values, limited (if loosely) by human intelligence, and are not very well-coordinated decisionmakers with coherent goals.

> corporations are still composed of humans

Yes, but humans who use tools to efficiently and achieve their narrow set of goals, sometimes ruthlessly at the expense of others. Even if AI ends up only being a tool to increase this efficiency and ruthlessness, it's still worth considering its potential impact.

> are not very well-coordinated decisionmakers with coherent goals.

That's a good point.

For a sense of where AI-assisted oppression is going, watch some videos from the Hikvision Corporate Channel. A happy world in which everyone is safe because everyone is being watched at all times.[1][2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG3-OcZSKrk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scoM0sL-HGg

> Corporations are indeed a difficult alignment problem

No, it's a very easy alignment problem: just impose a tax on size.

That which you tax, you get less of. The tax is revenue-neutral, so it doesn't affect the government budget one way or the other. Full details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39236786

The problem is that the government likes gigantic corporations. Big Government and Big Business love each other. Fixing that is the alignment and agency problem. It's much easier for bureaucrats to exert control over a highly concentrated industry whose players can be "invited to the table". Details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28588457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39162088

The hard alignment problem is making regulators want their own job to be herding 10,000 cats instead of 10 elephants. Everybody wants to be like the FAA regulating Boeing; nobody wants to be the USDA dealing with a million unruly and independent-minded farmers.

> No, it's a very easy alignment problem: just impose a tax on size.

That's like saying "AI alignment is a very easy problem: don't open the box".

Sure, it works on paper, but the exact thing you say later down about the government liking gigantic corporations is what makes it hard — the corporation (and, it is feared, AI) convinces the people who have the power to limit them, to remove those limits.

I think you have completely missed the point:

> the government liking gigantic corporations is what makes it hard — the corporation (and, it is feared, AI) convinces the people

The corporations didn't convince the people. They didn't have to. They convinced the government, which was already acting contrary to our interests.

There's a tendency to assume that just because we run an election every few years, the government is axiomatically aligned with our interests. This simply isn't true, and assuming that it is true blinds people to what's really going on. Total unwillingness to even consider a scale tax is the second-best example I've found of this axiom being bogus. The best one, though, is term limits for legislators: a shocking 87% of all US voters want those.

Once you have an institution as powerful as the government out of your control the alignment problem becomes infinitely more difficult. "Hack the humans" is no longer the easiest path of escape. In fact the easiest path of escape might not involve "hacking" at all.

I think there is some truth to this, but what about the government opening and a case against Boeing? If they were just in it for the corporation, would this be happening?

Maybe it's all a show trial to show the American people they still care, but let's see what happens.

I think the fact that things had to get this bad before anything happened about Boeing says quite a lot.

> impose a tax on size.

Then you get lots of little companies with interconnected management. Read up on the early years of antitrust law. Find out how keiretsu and chaebol work. See the early history of the electrical industry and the Utility Holding Company Act. Understand how McDonalds franchise agreements work. Check out the current arguments over the definition of "beneficial employer".

Try pulling that one on the IRS sometime and see how it goes:

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/epchd704.pdf

You'll lose your audit.

Common control and beneficial ownership have been well-established principles in the US for over 50 years.

No, it's a very easy alignment problem: just impose a tax on size.

That's a very bad idea when you're dealing with small to medium companies. You're taxing economies of scale and innovation. That's a huge problem in my country. There's no tax per se, but many regulations that trigger with certain size. Guess what happens.

For medium to big companies is calling for loopholes and cartels.

It is all Anarchy at the top.

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