Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Crises reveal centralisation, published by Vasco Grilo on March 28, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This is a crosspost for Crises reveal centralisation by Stefan Schubert, published on 3 May 2023.
An important question for people focused on AI risk, and indeed for anyone trying to influence the world, is: how centralised is power? Are there dominant actors that wield most of the power, or is it more equally distributed?
We can ask this question on two levels:
On the national level, how powerful is the central power - the government - relative to smaller actors, like private companies, nonprofits, and individual people?
On the global level, how powerful are the most powerful countries - in particular, the United States - relative to smaller countries?
I think there are some common heuristics that lead people to think that power is more decentralised than it is, on both of these levels.
One of these heuristics is what we can call "extrapolation from normalcy":
Extrapolation from normalcy: the view that an actor seeming to have power here and now (in relatively normal times) is a good proxy for it having power tout court.
It's often propped up by a related assumption about the epistemology of power:
Naive behaviourism about power (naive behaviourism, for short): the view that there is a direct correspondence between an actor's power and the official and easily observable actions it takes.
In other words, if an actor is powerful, then that will be reflected by official and easily observable actions, like widely publicised company investments or official government policies.
Extrapolation from normalcy plus naive behaviourism suggest that the distribution of power is relatively decentralised on the national level. In normal times, companies are pursuing many projects that have consequential social effects (e.g. the Internet and its many applications). While these projects are subject to government regulation to some extent, private companies normally retain a lot of leeway (depending on what they want to do).
This suggests (more so, the more you believe in naive behaviourism) that companies have quite a lot of power relative to governments in normal times. And extrapolation from normalcy implies that that this isn't just true in normal times, but holds true more generally.
Similarly, extrapolation from normalcy plus naive behaviourism suggest that power is relatively decentralised on the global level, where we compare the relative power of different countries. There are nearly 200 independent countries in the world, and most of them make a lot of official decisions without overt foreign interference. While it's true that invasions do occur, they are relatively rare (the Russian invasion of Ukraine notwithstanding).
Thus, naive behaviourism implies that power is decentralised under normal times, whereas extrapolation from normalcy extends that inference beyond normal times.
But in my view, the world is more centralised than these heuristics suggest. The easiest way to see that is to look at crises. During World War II, much of the economy was put under centralised control one way or another in many countries. Similarly, during Covid, many governments drastically curtailed individual liberties and companies' economic activities (rightly or wrongly).
And countries that want to acquire nuclear weapons (which can cause crises and wars) have found that they have less room to manoeuvre than the heuristics under discussion suggest. Accordingly, the US and other powerful nations have been able to reduce
nuclear proliferation substantially (even though they've not been able to stop it entirely).
It is true that smaller actors have a substantial amount of freedom to shape their own destiny under normal times, and that's an important fact. But still, who makes what official de...

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