Democracy might be a brief historical blip. That’s the unsettling thesis of a recent paper, which argues AI that can do all the work a human can do inevitably leads to the “gradual disempowerment” of humanity.

For most of history, ordinary people had almost no control over their governments. Liberal democracy emerged only recently, and probably not coincidentally around the Industrial Revolution.

Today's guest, David Duvenaud, used to lead the 'alignment evals' team at Anthropic, is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, and recently co-authored 'Gradual disempowerment.'

Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/dd

He argues democracy wasn’t the result of moral enlightenment — it was competitive pressure. Nations that educated their citizens and gave them political power built better armies and more productive economies. But what happens when AI can do all the producing — and all the fighting?

“The reason that states have been treating us so well in the West, at least for the last 200 or 300 years, is because they’ve needed us,” David explains. “Life can only get so bad when you’re needed. That’s the key thing that’s going to change.”

In David’s telling, once AI can do everything humans can do but cheaper, citizens become a national liability rather than an asset. With no way to make an economic contribution, their only lever becomes activism — demanding a larger share of redistribution from AI production. Faced with millions of unemployed citizens turned full-time activists, democratic governments trying to retain some “legacy” human rights may find they’re at a disadvantage compared to governments that strategically restrict civil liberties.

But democracy is just one front. The paper argues humans will lose control through economic obsolescence, political marginalisation, and the effects on culture that’s increasingly shaped by machine-to-machine communication — even if every AI does exactly what it’s told.

This episode was recorded on August 21, 2025.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Who’s David Duvenaud? (00:00:50)
• Alignment isn’t enough: we still lose control (00:01:30)
• Smart AI advice can still lead to terrible outcomes (00:14:14)
• How gradual disempowerment would occur (00:19:02)
• Economic disempowerment: Humans become "meddlesome parasites" (00:22:05)
• Humans become a "criminally decadent" waste of energy (00:29:29)
• Is humans losing control actually bad, ethically? (00:40:36)
• Political disempowerment: Governments stop needing people (00:57:26)
• Can human culture survive in an AI-dominated world? (01:10:23)
• Will the future be determined by competitive forces? (01:26:51)
• Can we find a single good post-AGI equilibria for humans? (01:34:29)
• Do we know anything useful to do about this? (01:44:43)
• How important is this problem compared to other AGI issues? (01:56:03)
• Improving global coordination may be our best bet (02:04:56)
• The 'Gradual Disempowerment Index' (02:07:26)
• The government will fight to write AI constitutions (02:10:33)
• “The intelligence curse” and Workshop Labs (02:16:58)
• Mapping out disempowerment in a world of aligned AGIs (02:22:48)
• What do David’s CompSci colleagues think of all this? (02:29:19)

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Music: CORBIT
Camera operator: Jake Morris
Coordination, transcriptions, and web: Katy Moore

In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, beliefs, and abilities equal treatment and rights have had significant success.

It’s tempting to believe this was inevitable — that the arc of history “bends toward justice,” and that as humans get richer, we’ll make even more moral progress.

But today's guest Christopher Brown — a professor of history at Columbia University and specialist in the abolitionist movement and the British Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries — believes the story of how slavery became unacceptable suggests moral progress is far from inevitable.

Rebroadcast: This episode was originally aired in February 2023.

Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.link/CLB

While most of us today feel that the abolition of slavery was sure to happen sooner or later as humans became richer and more educated, Christopher doesn't believe any of the arguments for that conclusion pass muster. If he's right, a counterfactual history where slavery remains widespread in 2023 isn't so far-fetched.

As Christopher lays out in his two key books, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism and Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, slavery has been ubiquitous throughout history. Slavery of some form was fundamental in Classical Greece, the Roman Empire, in much of the Islamic civilisation, in South Asia, and in parts of early modern East Asia, Korea, China.

It was justified on all sorts of grounds that sound mad to us today. But according to Christopher, while there’s evidence that slavery was questioned in many of these civilisations, and periodically attacked by slaves themselves, there was no enduring or successful moral advocacy against slavery until the British abolitionist movement of the 1700s.

That movement first conquered Britain and its empire, then eventually the whole world. But the fact that there's only a single time in history that a persistent effort to ban slavery got off the ground is a big clue that opposition to slavery was a contingent matter: if abolition had been inevitable, we’d expect to see multiple independent abolitionist movements thoroughly history, providing redundancy should any one of them fail.

Christopher argues that this rarity is primarily down to the enormous economic and cultural incentives to deny the moral repugnancy of slavery, and crush opposition to it with violence wherever necessary.

Mere awareness is insufficient to guarantee a movement will arise to fix a problem. Humanity continues to allow many severe injustices to persist, despite being aware of them. So why is it so hard to imagine we might have done the same with forced labour?

In this episode, Christopher describes the unique and peculiar set of political, social and religious circumstances that gave rise to the only successful and lasting anti-slavery movement in human history. These circumstances were sufficiently improbable that Christopher believes there are very nearby worlds where abolitionism might never have taken off.

Christopher and host Rob Wiblin also discuss:

• Various instantiations of slavery throughout human history
• Signs of antislavery sentiment before the 17th century
• The role of the Quakers in early British abolitionist movement
• The importance of individual “heroes” in the abolitionist movement
• Arguments against the idea that the abolition of slavery was contingent
• Whether there have ever been any major moral shifts that were inevitable

Chapters:

• Rob's intro (00:00:00)
• Cold open (00:01:45)
• Who's Christopher Brown? (00:03:00)
• Was abolitionism inevitable? (00:08:53)
• The history of slavery (00:14:35)
• Signs of antislavery sentiment before the 17th century (00:19:24)
• Quakers (00:32:37)
• Attitudes to slavery in other religions (00:44:37)
• Quaker advocacy (00:56:28)
• Inevitability and contingency (01:06:29)
• Moral revolution (01:16:39)
• The importance of specific individuals (01:29:23)
• Later stages of the antislavery movement (01:41:33)
• Economic theory of abolition (01:55:27)
• Influence of knowledge work and education (02:12:15)
• Moral foundations theory (02:20:43)
• Figuring out how contingent events are (02:32:42)
• Least bad argument for why abolition was inevitable (02:41:45)
• Were any major moral shifts inevitable? (02:47:29)

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Milo McGuire
Transcriptions: Katy Moore