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Why do so many technophiles dislike the idea of world government?

4 points by black_thoughts ↗ HN
I rarely see the concept of "world government", or governance, or a world court or any such thing, spoken of positively by anyone. That includes technophiles and futurists who are fully cognizant of and believe in the concept of a technological singularity that needs to be controlled, "aligned", made safe etc.

Solutions to AI safety usually focus on how the AI should be coded, and it seems to me that the idea of "cancelling war/ merely human economics" -- in a sense, dropping our tools wherever humanity is not focused entirely on making a safe FAI -- is a little neglected.

Of course, some of the people who focus on the mathematical/logical/code aspects of safe AI are doing a great job, and I don't mean to disparage their work. But I am nonetheless posing this question.

I also do not (necessarily) mean to conflate world government with a communist system that ignores Hayek's fatal conceit and therefore renders humanity less capable of building AIs, computers etc. Just some type of governance singleton that means all nukes are in safe hands, etc.

8 comments

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h2odragon
We appreciate the Snafu Principle; that authority imposes communications friction that deprives it of the data it needs to govern effectively. In other words, Government has a maximum size, and that number is far smaller than the world populations.

Having governments stack, "governing the country governments"; fails too because the whole structure is still made form individual human beings, whose limits are reflected in the things we build.

spacedcowboy
Personally I don't think democracy scales well. It works at the "small nation state" level to the extent that it's better than anything else we've come up with, and there's a limit to what a small nation state can do while still being traded with by other countries etc.

I don't actually think democracy works well even at the scale of the USA - witness the group of old white men who have a tenacious grip on power despite being out of touch with those they "govern". Scaling it even further up makes it less and less likely to be useful, IMHO.

Democracy requires accountability to keep its leaders in line, and once the number of people a "representative" is responsible for gets past a nominal number, that representation becomes meaningless, the accountability drops, and the control over unconscionable excess recedes.

People will disagree, and that's fine - that's democracy :)

ZeroGravitas
The US is a case where it's an obvious lack of democracy (2 senators per state, the electoral college) to blame so it's a strange example of democracy not scaling well.

Americans overall poll as very reasonable people, it's just not reflected in their lawmaking.

Note there is a solid 30% who seem to choose the worst possible option in polls but I'd argue that is result of the lack of democracy and they've been trained into that over decades.

ompogUe
Representative democracy might not scale well, but that was designed when it was an 8 day horse ride back to the districts. You really wanted someone with "boots on the ground" at the seat of power to represent you.

But we don't know what "real" democracy would look like.

I see it as everyone who wants can join in the documented conversations about the nuts and bolts of governance (forums, rfp's, rfc's), and everyone who wanted could join in voting for those with a button click. With full transparency of the tools, the process, and the results.

rossdavidh
So, there is an abundance of evidence by now that the more power is held at the top, the more determined ambitious people are to get there. If that means being the best at manipulating the people and/or computer that is at the center of power, then it is not unlikely that the most ambitious people will succeed at finding a way to do that.

Moreover, a single (or multiple) bad government(s) is a big problem, and may take decades for a nation's people to solve, but as long as there are other places (not governed by that government) to go to, expatriates can gather there to discuss what went wrong, what to do instead, and how to bring it about. If a single government dominates all, you are in an it-can-never-fail situation.

Or, to put it another way, one world government is the mother of all "Single Point of Failure"s.

T-A
According to The Economist Democracy Index, 8% of the world's population lived in full democracies in 2022, vs 36.9% in autocracies and the rest somewhere in between [1]. You can pick other democracy indices and measures of freedom, but you will always find that those at liberty to even just publicly contemplate a change of government are a tiny minority.

If today's world were to somehow end up having a single government, what would it be most like, those of the WEIRD [2] minority or those of the vast majority?

And even if a miracle happened and the whole world embraced freedom, how long would that last - and where would you seek refuge after the inevitable rise of the next charismatic demagogue?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias

black_thoughts
Good comment, I like arguments backed by stats! I do recognise the validity of this line of thought.

Food for thought for you, though: is solving this problem (a "miracle") not quite similar to the problem of making a safe FAI, possibly with hard takeoff?

That is to say, shouldn't we be concerned that we can't (at least gesture towards) solving this problem of most people having crappy governments, when we are also supposed to be solving the problem of AI alignment? I feel as though these two problems are intimately related beyond just the issue of bad governance interfering with or actively hindering safe AI research.

strangattractor
"...governance singleton that means all nukes are in safe hands"

Why would a single government need nukes at all? Who would they use them against other than their own citizens?

Reasons the idea doesn't catch on may be that there is no clear articulated advantage to doing so. Or to do so would disempower a lot of currently powerful people. Many people don't want or like democracies (think Taliban or Theocracy).

The tyranny of the majority [1] has destroyed many democracies and something the US Constitution is in place to supposedly prevent. One might think that it has gone a little too far since a mere 8 people are powerful enough to jam up the entire US Government. We should likely get our own house in order before selling this thing to the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority#:~:tex....