Introducing Intelligence Age

“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.”

The following broad principles—a non-exhaustive list—will help guide our work as we grapple with the inquiry we have set forth above: