Just the same, war is roughly a constant, and I’m struggling to think of any country anywhere that is not at war, has not seen a war within the current generation, or at least hasn’t been disrupted by refugees fleeing a war. The state of law and of human society today is one where the wealthy and powerful are continually exploiting and massacring their lessers. In the middle-class American world, i.e. the insular habitat of the globally most wealthy and powerful, war and genocide are something that happens to other people and slavery ended with Lincoln. There’s a reason singularitarians are almost to a man wealthy first-world white people, nobody else could convince themselves that the massive social disruption of an outbreak of hostile alien intelligence would pan out like an HOA meeting about appropriate lawn length.

By long-standing historical quirk, embedded in a corner of this community is a small ghetto, also mono-racial, but a different race. The ghetto only exists through the acquiescence of the surrounding community, which pays for the ghetto directly (via Section 8 and other subsidies) and indirectly (by not seizing the valuable land on which it sits). The ghetto contributes almost nothing to the larger community’s economy or culture or governance, but provides almost all its serious crime.

Attitudes in the wealthy host community vary. Some appreciate this element of diversity. Some are conflicted. Many resent it, and would be delighted if somehow the ghetto would just go away. They wouldn’t burn it down, mind you, but they’d happily use every legal means to encourage its disappearance. A few would be willing to go further. They all agree that housing is so expensive, their kids may never have the chance to move back to the community they grew up in, and that breaks their hearts.

Attitudes in the ghetto range from complacency to hopelessness to angry resentment — no visible gratitude.

Of course the people involved all share our values — they’re us. So we already know what happens when a highly productive community hosts an entrenched pocket of the unproductive.

(This is not a thought experiment: I’m describing where I live.)

Now replace the wealthy community with AIs, and replace the ghetto with the sort of “retired” humans Robin hopefully describes.

Even if the AIs mirrored our values flawlessly, why would relations be any smoother?

That’s the question blogger and transhumanist economist Robin Hanson asked his class recently. He writes: On Tuesday I asked my law & econ undergrads what sort of future robots (AIs computers etc.) they would want, if they could have any……