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Agreed. For AIs less powerful than Skynet-paperclipper destroying mankind, I have total confidence that the administrative state will either legally put the squeeze on AI adoption (thereby retaining almost all the jobs we have now), or manufacture an infinite quantity of replacement Graeber-ite Bullshit Jobs, such that all AI-unemployment doomerism is nonsense. As someone posted the other week, the administrative state already makes most labour-saving technology illegal; the profit motive is powerless next to an apparatchik in a grey suit spewing safetyism into legislation. (As an aside, the more I read about this, the more I wonder why the USSR collapsed, because economic inefficiency obviously isn't really able to cause state failure - if it were, the West would have buried all our own regimes too).
Every imagined AI problem below UFAGI is a nothingburger in both a relative and absolute sense, because as long as human lawmakers are still in control, all economic problems are only the stroke of a pen away from a solution.
I've lately considered the possible explanation of "glasnost and perestroika annihilated the USSR's legitimacy; the economic downturn simply enabled the conditions for Gorbachev to come in and see off the USSR," but the problem with that is that Soviet Russia's own distortion of history obviously set up the conditions for liberalization of information to destroy it--the population simply didn't have the intellectual antibodies to deal with that.
As to your main point, I think AI could potentially be so disruptive that administrative-state force will be like so much dandelion bits in the wind before it. Indeed, the argument around that AI-development-pause letter from a couple weeks back was that, if America pauses AI development, China might not. Someone, somewhere will be less scrupulous than the people who might otherwise have to grapple with the issue head-on--the Asshole Filter for all humankind. That does worry me, now that I type that out.
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