The augmentation gap in a constitution for AI

Arif Jameel is an independent scholar in Lahore. In September he released a proposal for what he calls a human constitution for artificial intelligence, “We the Living Generation”: The Ceteris Paribus Law. Companies write constitutions for their own systems, but there is no binding floor anywhere that protects people. Jameel proposes a preamble and ten articles as that floor.

In section 4.5 he builds on my chapter in the Palermo volume, In the Shadow of the Machine: The Order of Magnitude Year. He writes that it strengthens the empirical basis of the Law and calls it “a significant contemporary foundation for the present theory”.

What he takes up in particular is the augmentation gap. When capability compounds in orders of magnitude, inequality is no longer only about income. It is about who can make things happen. Jameel writes that the concept gives his eighth article, on the concentration of AI power, “a concrete, named mechanism”.

This matters to me for one reason. The essay was written from inside the work, at the end of a year when the metrics stopped working, and it ended on a question rather than an answer. Someone on the other side of the world has now taken that question and built on it. That is what one writes for.

I have added the augmentation gap to the concepts on the research page.