Introducing Intelligence Age

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The post below reflects the views of its author, and not necessarily those of any other OpenAI employees or of the organization as a whole. In general, posts written on this blog will similarly convey only the views of the author(s), not OpenAI organizational positions.

“Will it be sufficient… to trust these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power?”—James Madison, Federalist No. 48

It is our pleasure to launch Intelligence Age, the blog of OpenAI’s new Strategic Futures team. We are a small team with the collective goal of answering one overarching question: how should free society be restructured to preserve individual rights and agency while accommodating the emergence of transformative AI?

Questions like this are sometimes referred to as concentration of power risks within the broader AI safety and policy community. Our team is founded on the idea that, in the long run, this category of risk is the largest, most serious, and most conceptually challenging to address. Why?

The modern state is the product of a long, uneven process of bargaining between various centers of power, such as the owners of capital and commodities, the wielders of political power, and the people. Most fundamentally, political and military power has rested on labor. To hold political power is to possess the monopoly on legitimate force.

For all of human history, that monopoly has consisted of soldiers and what we today call “police,” along with a vast civil-military bureaucracy—complemented, to be sure, by many technological tools, but fundamentally operated by human beings whose support was needed to sustain the operation. And the whole apparatus—the soldiers, the tools, the attendant bureaucracy—was funded by taxes collected from the wages or production of human beings who had to be willing to pay.

Power, at the core, has depended upon the large-scale cooperation and consent of many human beings. David Hume verbalized this often-implicit assumption succinctly when he observed that political leaders have “nothing to support them but [popular] opinion.”

But perhaps no longer. Advancements in real-world autonomous systems may soon mean that states will be able to project force—domestically and internationally—without relying on cooperative soldiers or police officers. And advancements in machine intelligence may mean that the state can collect the revenue it needs not from the fruit of individual human labor, but from the outputs of data centers.

The operation of the bureaucracy itself, too, could be largely automated. Power may therefore no longer require a society-wide bargain to be sustained, and the people, broadly conceived, may have only a small seat at the negotiating table, or perhaps none at all.

Avoiding this outcome is fundamental to the preservation of human freedom. No amount of scientific discovery or technological progress or economic growth is worth the sacrifice of long-run individual autonomy this outcome would entail. Many of the anxieties that rightfully animate the nascent politics of AI relate to this question: Businesses, interest groups, and individuals alike all share the worry: “Will I lose