Show Notes
Peter Salib is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center and co-director of the Center for Law & AI Risk. Simon Goldstein is an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong, a senior editor at AI Frontiers, and a visiting senior scholar at Forethought. They have written together about AI safety, AI rights, and the governance of advanced AI.
They joined Forethought’s Fin Moorhouse to discuss their new paper, Liberalism Forever. The conversation covers:
Their “null hypothesis”: today’s liberal institutions — free markets and democratic governance — may already hold most of the answers for governing the far future, and longtermists have underrated their power
Examining whether canonical social-science arguments for markets and democracy still hold under transformative AI, space colonization, and explosive growth, and claiming that most survive (and several get stronger)
Why they favour reasoning “at the margin” over designing a detailed end-state, and why proposals like viatopia and the long reflection sound liberal but risk illiberalism when actually implemented
Whether the standard case for markets — information aggregation, allocative efficiency, innovation — still bites once AGI can read off preferences directly
Why inequality is, in their view, a comparatively boring problem with a known solution (tax-and-transfer), why AI-specific taxes like a compute tax are misguided, and how the growth-versus-distribution trade-off changes when growth rates get very high
Dyson swarms and space resources: why they doubt there’s any real monopoly worry, since energy would be additive with free entry, and why property auctions might beat egalitarian allocation schemes
The arguments for democracy that persist post-AGI — public-choice/selectorate incentives and democracy as a commitment device — versus the epistemic arguments, which they think weaken
Why AGI could make autocracy more competitive (loyal AI bureaucrats and militaries removing the need for a human winning coalition), and what preserving democratic control requires in response
Handoffs to superintelligent AI and successionism, and their preferred alternative of extending the franchise to AIs with their own values rather than deferring wholesale
The history of new “technologies of democracy,” from the Federalist Papers to LLMs as impartial arbiters, and where each author thinks their own argument is weakest
You can read a full transcript here.
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