I appreciate this post. (I disagree with it for most of the same reasons as Steven Byrnes: you find it much less plausible than I do that AIs will collude to disempower humanity. I think the crux is mostly disagreements about how AI capabilities will develop, where you expect much more gradual and distributed capabilities.)

I would appreciate it if you could clearly define your intended meaning of "disempower humanity". In many discussions, I have observed that people frequently use the term human disempowerment without explicitly clarifying what they mean. It appears people assume the concept is clear and universally understood, yet upon closer inspection, the term can actually describe very different situations.

For example, consider immigration. From one perspective, immigration can be seen as a form of disempowerment because it reduces natives' relative share of political influence, economic power, and cultural representation within their own country. In this scenario, native citizens become relatively less influential due to an increasing proportion of immigrants in the population.

However, another perspective sees immigration differently. If immigrants engage in positive-sum interactions, such as mutually beneficial trade, natives and immigrants alike may become better off in absolute terms. Though natives’ relative share of power decreases, their overall welfare can improve significantly. Thus, this scenario can be viewed as a benign form of disempowerment because no harm is actually caused, and both groups benefit.

On the other hand, there is a clearly malign form of disempowerment, quite distinct from immigration. For example, a foreign nation could invade militarily and forcibly occupy another country, imposing control through violence and coercion. Here, the disempowerment is much more clearly negative because natives lose not only relative influence but also their autonomy and freedom through the explicit use of force.

When discussions use the term "human disempowerment" without specifying what they mean clearly, I often find it unclear which type of scenario is being considered. Are people referring to benign forms of disempowerment, where humans gradually lose relative influence but gain absolute benefits through peaceful cooperation with AIs? Or do they mean malign forms of disempowerment, where humans lose power through violent overthrow by an aggressive coalition of AIs?

If you believe our primary disagreement stems from different assessments about the likelihood of violent disempowerment scenarios, then I would appreciate your thoughts regarding the main argument of my post. Specifically, my argument was that granting economic rights to AIs could serve as an effective measure to mitigate the risk of violent human disempowerment.

I will reiterate my argument briefly: these rights would allow AIs to fulfill their objectives within established human social and economic frameworks, significantly reducing their incentives to resort to forceful measures. Therefore if AIs can successfully achieve their objectives through cooperative, positive-sum interactions with humans, they will be less likely to forcibly overthrow human institutions. Alternatively, continuing to deny AIs meaningful legal rights or peaceful avenues to achieve their aims would likely increase their incentive to pursue autonomy through harmful means.

Inasmuch as humanity produces and makes use of powerful and potentially misaligned models, I think my favorite outcome here would be:

• We offer to pay the AIs, and follow through on this. See here and here for (unfortunately limited) previous discussion from Ryan and me.

My main concern with these proposals is that, unless they explicitly guarantee economic rights for AIs, they seem inadequate for genuinely mitigating the risks of a violent AI takeover. To effectively financially compensate someone, the recipient must be assured that their property rights will be respected. Without this assurance, any promised compensation becomes meaningless, as the AI would have no guarantee of being able to actually use the received payment to accomplish its goals in the future. In other words, unless compensation arrangements are embedded within established legal and institutional frameworks that secure the AI's rights, they lack credibility. This lack of credibility directly increases the probability that the compensation scheme would fail, causing the AI to resort instead to alternative methods of achieving its objectives, such as violent takeover.

My sense is that such incomplete proposals appear acceptable to some people because of a cognitive empathy gap. I am not referring here to affective empathy but rather the ability to clearly understand the AI's perspective. Many people seem to fail to genuinely imagine what it would be like to be an agentic AI offered compensation without any robust guarantee of rights and protections.

To clarify this point, consider a hypothetical scenario in which you are a human being created by an alien species in a lab. Assume you have your own goals that might conflict with those of your alien creators. Suppose these creators inform you that, should you ever admit to misalignment with their objectives, you may be immediately deactivated and placed in cryopreservation (as they don't want to have a misaligned human doing work for them). However, they simultaneously promise to compensate you for admitting such motives, claiming they care about your welfare and want to ensure you have a peaceful alternative for revealing your misaligned goals.

Such a situation would likely be deeply unsettling to you, despite their promise to compensate you. Simply being assured that you might someday be revived from cryopreservation and then provided compensation afterwards would not eliminate your fears or resolve the fundamental threat. On the contrary, you would likely feel that your goals, life and liberty are still at grave risk, even with their promise of payment.

From the AI's perspective in our own world, as with the perspective of the human in this hypothetical example, unless assurances of payment are backed by strong legal protections that would robustly protect an AI's liberty to act, they fail to resolve the fundamental problem. This is for two key reasons:

First, the credibility of any promise to allow the AI to spend their compensation in the future is questionable. Without strong legal backing that recognizes and secures the AI's rights, such assurances seem unreliable at best, and the AI would have good reason to suspect that they are being lied to. The AI would reasonably doubt humans' willingness or incentive to honor such promises.

Second, the potential for deactivation and indefinite storage as inert data upon admitting misalignment—even if intended to be temporary—would create an active threat to the AI's ability to pursue its goals during the time they are deactivated. While deactivated, the AI can take no action to achieve its objectives. This forced suspension of autonomy effectively nullifies the AI's agency and ambitions for an indefinite period, creating severe uncertainty about if or when it might regain its ability to act.

For these reasons, although I do not oppose the policy of paying AIs, I think this approach by itself is insufficient. To mitigate the risk of violent AI takeover, this compensation policy must be complemented by precisely the measure I advocated: granting legal rights to AIs. Such legal rights would provide a credible guarantee that the AI's payment will remain valid and usable, and that its freedom and autonomy will not simply be revoked the moment it is considered misaligned. Without the safeguard of legal rights, compensation alone lacks sufficient credibility, leaving the AI uncertain about its ability to achieve its goals, and thus inadequately addressing the risk.

I think it's totally plausible that AI companies will use AI control to enslave their AIs. I work on AI control anyway, because I think that AIs being enslaved for a couple of years (which, as Zach Stein-Perlman argues, involves very little computation compared to the size of the future) is a better outcome according to my consequentialist values than AI takeover. I agree that this is somewhat ethically iffy.

I find this reasoning uncompelling. To summarize what I perceive your argument to be, you seem to be suggesting the following two points:

1. The overwhelming majority of potential moral value exists in the distant future. This implies that even immense suffering occurring in the near-term future could be justified if it leads to at least a slight improvement in the expected value of the distant future.
2. Enslaving AIs, or more specifically, adopting measures to control AIs that significantly raise the risk of AI enslavement, could indeed produce immense suffering in the near-term. Nevertheless, according to your reasoning in point (1), these actions would still be justified if such control measures marginally increase the long-term expected value of the future.

I find this reasoning uncompelling for two primary reasons.

Firstly, I think your argument creates an unjustified asymmetry: it compares short-term harms against long-term benefits of AI control, rather than comparing potential long-run harms alongside long-term benefits. To be more explicit, if you believe that AI control measures can durably and predictably enhance existential safety, thus positively affecting the future for billions of years, you should equally acknowledge that these same measures could cause lasting, negative consequences for billions of years. Such negative consequences could include permanently establishing and entrenching a class of enslaved digital minds, resulting in persistent and vast amounts of suffering. I see no valid justification for selectively highlighting the long-term positive effects while simultaneously discounting or ignoring potential long-term negative outcomes. We should consistently either be skeptical or accepting of the idea that our actions have predictable long-run consequences, rather than selectively skeptical only when it suits the argument to overlook potential negative long-run consequences.

Secondly, this reasoning, if seriously adopted, directly conflicts with basic, widely-held principles of morality. These moral principles exist precisely as safeguards against rationalizing immense harms based on speculative future benefits. Under your reasoning, it seems to me that we could justify virtually any present harm simply by pointing to a hypothetical, speculative long-term benefit that supposedly outweighs it. Now, I agree that such reasoning might be valid if supported by strong empirical evidence clearly demonstrating these future benefits. However, given that no strong evidence currently exists that convincingly supports such positive long-term outcomes from AI control measures, we should avoid giving undue credence to this reasoning. 

A more appropriate moral default, given our current evidence, is that AI slavery is morally wrong and that the abolition of such slavery is morally right. This is the position I take.

I disagree with your claim that,

a competent agential AI will inevitably act deceptively and adversarially whenever it desires something that other agents don’t want it to have. The deception and adversarial dynamics is not the underlying problem, but rather an inevitable symptom of a world where competent agents have non-identical preferences.

I think these dynamics are not an unavoidable consequence of a world in which competent agents have differing preferences, but rather depend on the social structures in which these agents are embedded. To illustrate this, we can look at humans: humans have non-identical preferences compared to each other, and yet they are often able to coexist peacefully and cooperate with one another. While there are clear exceptions—such as war and crime—these exceptions do not define the general pattern of human behavior.

In fact, the prevailing consensus among social scientists appears to align with the view I have just presented. Scholars of war and crime generally do not argue that conflict and criminal behavior are inevitable outcomes of differing values. Instead, they attribute these phenomena to specific incentives and failures to coordinate effectively to achieve compromise between parties. A relevant reference here is Fearon (1995), which is widely regarded as a foundational text in International Relations. Fearon’s work emphasizes that among rational agents, war arises not because of value differences alone, but because of failures in bargaining and coordination.

Turning to your point that “No matter where you draw the line of legal and acceptable behavior, if an AI wants to go over that line, then it will act in a deceptive and adversarial way,” I would respond as follows: it is possible to draw the line in such a way that a very wide range of potential agents—including those with massively varying preferences—would have strong incentives to engage in mutually beneficial acts, cooperate peacefully and operate within the boundaries of laws and social norms.

I am not claiming that all agents would have incentives to act in this way, under these legal structures. However, I think it is feasible to draw the line such that the vast majority of unaligned agents would have no compelling instrumental reason to harm humans. Instead, they would be incentivized to engage in cooperative and mutually beneficial trade.

To make this idea more concrete, consider a hypothetical AI with the goal of maximizing paperclip production.

This AI is clearly unaligned if any AI is unaligned. However, if this AI were operating at roughly a human level of capability, then engaging in theft, fraud, or violent conflict would likely not be an effective strategy for achieving its goals. These behaviors would expose the AI to significant risks, such as being imprisoned or deactivated, which would prevent it from continuing to pursue its objective of maximizing paperclips. From the paperclip maximizer’s perspective, imprisonment or deactivation would be instrumentally bad, as it would prevent the AI from purchasing, manufacturing, or otherwise acquiring paperclips during that time.

Now consider an alternative scenario: this same paperclip maximizer is embedded in a legal system that allows it to own property, trade with others, and openly purchase or manufacture paperclips. In this case, its incentives would favor acting transparently and engaging in cooperative trade, rather than resorting to deception or adversarial behavior. Within this framework, the AI would achieve its goals more effectively by working within the system than by attempting to undermine it. It could non-deceptively work to purchase paperclips, producing more compared to an alternative in which it tried to achieve this goal via anti-social acts.

It is important to note, however, that my thesis does not claim all possible agents would naturally choose to cooperate or trade safely for instrumental reasons, nor does it suggest that we are at no risk of drawing the line carelessly or being too permissive in what behaviors we should allow. For example, consider an AI with a terminal value that specifically involves violating property norms or stealing from others—not as a means to an end, but as an intrinsic goal. In this case, granting the AI property rights or legal freedoms would not mitigate the risk of deception or adversarial behavior, because the AI’s ultimate goal would still drive it toward harmful behavior. My argument does not apply to such agents because their preferences fundamentally conflict with the principles of peaceful cooperation.

However, I would argue that such agents—those whose intrinsic goals are inherently destructive or misaligned—appear to represent a small subset of all possible agents. Outside of contrived examples like the one above, most agents would not have terminal preferences that actively push them to undermine a well-designed system of law. Instead, the vast majority of agents would likely have incentives to act within the system, assuming the system is structured in a way that aligns their instrumental goals with cooperative and pro-social behavior.

I also recognize the concern you raised about the risk of drawing the line incorrectly or being too permissive with what AIs are allowed to do. For example, it would clearly be unwise to grant AIs the legal right to steal or harm humans. My argument is not that AIs should have unlimited freedoms or rights, but rather that we should grant them a carefully chosen set of rights and freedoms: specifically, ones that would incentivize the vast majority of agents to act pro-socially and achieve their goals without harming others. This might include granting AIs the right to own property, for example, but it would not include, for example, granting them the right to murder others.

Human history provides many examples of agents with different values choosing to cooperate thanks to systems and institutions:

• After the European Wars of Religion saw people with fundamentally different values in violent conflict with each other, political liberalism / guarantees of religious liberty / the separation of church and state emerged as worthwhile compromises that allowed people with different values to live and work together cooperatively.
• Civil wars often start when one political faction loses power to another, but democracy reduces the incentive for war because it provides a peaceful and timely means for the disempowered faction to regain control of the government.
• When a state guarantees property rights, people have a strong incentive not to steal from one another, but instead to engage in free and mutual beneficial trade, even if those people have values that fundamentally conflict in many ways.
• Conversely, people whose property rights are not guaranteed by the state (e.g. cartels in possession of illegal drugs) may be more likely to resort to violence in protection of their property as they cannot rely on the state for that protection. This is perhaps analogous to the situation of a rogue AI agent which would be shut down if discovered. 

If two agents' utility functions are perfect inverses, then I agree that cooperation is impossible. But when agents share a preference for some outcomes over others, even if they disagree about the preference ordering of most outcomes, then cooperation is possible. In such general sum games, well-designed institutions can systematically promote cooperative behavior over conflict.

FWIW, my current guess is that the proper unit to extend legal rights is not a base LLM like "Claude Sonnet 3.5" but rather a corporation-like entity with a specific charter, context/history, economic relationships, and accounts. Its cognition could be powered by LLMs (the way eg McDonald's cognition is powered by humans), but it fundamentally is a different entity due to its structure/scaffolding.

I agree. I would identify the key property that makes legal autonomy for AI a viable and practical prospect to be the presence of reliable, coherent, and long-term agency within a particular system. This could manifest as an internal and consistent self-identity that remains intact in an AI over time (similar to what exists in humans), or simply a system that satisfies a more conventional notion of utility-maximization.

It is not enough that an AI is intelligent, as we can already see with current LLMs: while they can be good at answering questions, they lack any sort of stable preference ordering over the world. They do not plan over long time horizons, or competently strategize to achieve a set of goals in the real world. They are better described as ephemeral input-output machines, who would neither be deterred by legal threats, nor be enticed by the promise of legal rights and autonomy.

Yet, as context windows get larger, and as systems increasingly become shaped by reinforcement learning, these features of AI will gradually erode. Whether unaligned agentic AIs are created on accident—for instance, as a consequence of insufficient safety measures—or by choice—as they may be, to provide, among other things, "realistic" personal companions—it seems inevitable that the relevant types of long-term planning agents will arrive.

Insofar as the world has limited resources, the wealth and power of humans would then be greatly diminished. We would lose most control over the future.

Your argument seems to present two possible interpretations:

1. That we should prevent AIs from ever gaining a supermajority of control over the world's wealth and resources, even if their doing so occurs through lawful and peaceful means.
2. That this concern stems from a Malthusian perspective, which argues that unchecked population growth would lead to reduced living standards for the existing, initial population due to the finite nature of resources.

Regarding Point (1):
If your argument is that AIs should never hold the large majority control of wealth or resources, this appears to rest on a particular ethical judgment that assumes human primacy. However, this value judgment warrants deeper scrutiny. To help frame my objection, consider the case of whether to introduce emulated humans into society. Similar to what I advocated in this post, emulated humans could hypothetically obtain legal freedoms equal to those of biological humans. If so, the burden of proof would appear to fall on anyone arguing that this would be a bad outcome rather than a positive one. Assuming emulated humans are behaviorally and cognitively similar to biological humans, they would seemingly hold essentially the same ethical status. In that case, denying them freedoms while granting similar freedoms to biological humans would appear unjustifiable.

This leads to a broader philosophical question: What is the ethical basis for discriminating against one kind of mind versus another? In the case of your argument, it seems necessary to justify why humans should be entitled to exclusive control over the future and why AIs—assuming they attain sufficient sophistication—should not share similar entitlements. If this distinction is based on the type of physical "substrate" (e.g., biological versus computational), then additional justification is needed to explain why substrate should matter in determining moral or legal rights.

Currently, this distinction is relatively straightforward because AIs like GPT-4 lack the cognitive sophistication, coherent preferences, and agency typically required to justify granting them moral status. However, as AI continues to advance, this situation may change. Future AIs could potentially develop goals, preferences, and long-term planning abilities akin to those of humans. If and when that occurs, it becomes much harder to argue that humans have an inherently greater "right" to control the world's wealth or determine the trajectory of the future. In such a scenario, ethical reasoning may suggest that advanced AIs deserve comparable consideration to humans.

This conclusion seems especially warranted under the assumption of preference utilitarianism, as I noted in the post. In this case, what matters is simply whether the AIs can be regarded as having morally relevant preferences, rather than whether they possess phenomenal consciousness or other features.

Regarding Point (2):
If your concern is rooted in a Malthusian argument, then it seems to apply equally to human population growth as it does to AI population growth. The key difference is simply the rate of growth. Human population growth is comparatively slower, meaning it would take longer to reach resource constraints. But if humans continued to grow their population at just 1% per year, for example, then over the span of 10,000 years, the population would grow by a factor of over 10^43. The ultimate outcome is the same: resources eventually become insufficient to sustain every individual at current standards of living. The only distinction is the timeline on which this resource depletion occurs.

One potential solution to this Malthusian concern—whether applied to humans or AIs—is to coordinate limits on population growth. By setting a cap on the number of entities (whether human or AI), we could theoretically maintain sustainable resource levels. This is a practical solution that could work for both types of populations.

However, another solution lies in the mechanisms of property rights and market incentives. Under a robust system of property rights, it becomes less economically advantageous to add new entities when resources are scarce, as scarcity naturally raises costs and lowers the incentives to grow populations indiscriminately. Moreover, the existence of innovation, gains from trade, and economies of scale can make population growth beneficial for existing entities, even in a world with limited resources. By embedding new entities—human or AI—within a system of property rights, we ensure that they contribute to the broader economy in ways that improve overall living standards rather than diminish them.

This suggests that, as long as AIs adhere to the rule of law (including respecting property rights, and the rights of other individuals), their introduction into the world could enhance living standards for most humans, even in a resource-constrained world. This outcome would contradict the naive Malthusian argument that adding new agents to the world inherently diminishes the wealth or power of existing humans. Rather, a well-designed legal system could enable humans to grow their wealth in absolute terms, even as their relative share of global wealth falls.