Naive question: I see many EAs talking about non-extinction X-risks such as the alleged dangers of 'value lock-in' or the imposition of a 'global permanent totalitarian state'. Most recently I came across Will MacAskill mentioning these as plausible risks in the new book 'What we owe the future'.
As an evolutionary psychologist, I'm deeply puzzled by the idea that any biologically reproducing species could ever be subject to a 'permanent' socio-cultural condition of the sort that's posited. On an evolutionary time scale, 'permanent' doesn't just mean 'a few centuries of oppression'. It would mean 'zero change in the biological foundations of the species being oppressed -- including no increased ability to resist or subvert oppression -- across tens of thousands of generations'.
As long as humans or post-humans are reproducing in any way that involves mutation, recombination, and selection (either with standard DNA or post-DNA genome-analogs such as digital recipes for AGIs), Darwinian evolution will churn along. Any traits that yield reproductive advantages in the 'global totalitarian state' will spread, changing the gene pool, and changing the psychology that the 'global totalitarians' would need to manage.
Unless the global totalitarians are artificial entities such as AIs that are somehow immune to any significant evolution or learning in their own right, the elites running the totalitarian state would also be subject to biological evolution. Their heritable values, preferences, and priorities would gradually drift and shift over thousands of generations. Any given dictator might want their family dynasty to retain power forever. But Mendelian randomization, bad mate choices, regression to the mean, and genetic drift almost always disrupt those grand plans within a few generations.
So, can someone please point me to any readings that outline a plausible way whereby humans could be subject to any kind of 'global totalitarian oppressive system' across a time scale of more than a hundred generations?
This post itself sounds very misinformed about CCP history over the past hundred years.
Yes, the CCP changes, but not its underlying logic of unlimited power, and all the dangers associated with it.
Yes, it adapts to external environment to survive, but the domestic costs of doing so cannot be lightly overlooked - such as some of the worst famines, political purges, mass-shooting against teenage students, mass imprisonment, forced labour camps (and the list goes on) humanity has ever seen.
There is the tendency among some China watchers, in their eagerness to 'educate' the West about China, too quickly adopt the official narrative and history of the CCP. In doing so, they create a dangerous alliance, often out of ignorance more than willingness. Only when one can get over the hook of CCP official propaganda can one truly begin to see China as it is (sometimes it does seem terribly enticing. Hundreds of millions of people literally lifted out of by the Mother Party, rising on the global stage, developing modern technology, etc.). And I'm beginning to come to the view that the moral instincts of ignorant people reacting to phenomena in China are often more laudable than those of 'experts', who claim to know subtleties but in effect really are finding hopeless justifications for a morally bankrupt system. I'd recommend reading not Western China watchers but well-respected (and often suppressed) Chinese experts, scholars such as Gao Hua, Qin Hui, Shen Zhihua, to name a few.