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Stable Totalitarianism: An Overview
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80000_Hours·poppinfresh
Credibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
Published on the EA Forum by 80,000 Hours in October 2024, this piece is part of a broader cause prioritization effort and is relevant to AI safety researchers concerned with power concentration and lock-in risks from advanced AI systems.
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36
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eaforum
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Cause prioritizationAI safetyExistential riskPolicyTotalitarianismAI governanceDemocracyGlobal governanceLong-term future
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Importance: 62/100blog postanalysis
Summary
An overview by 80,000 Hours analyzing the risk of 'stable totalitarianism'—a scenario where a totalitarian regime achieves permanent global dominance, potentially enabled by AI—as a pressing existential or civilizational risk. The piece evaluates the problem using the scale, neglectedness, and solvability framework, and outlines actions including AI governance and researching global coordination risks.
Key Points
- •Stable totalitarianism—a permanent, world-spanning authoritarian regime—is framed as a potential existential or near-existential risk to humanity's long-term future.
- •AI could enable totalitarian regimes by providing unprecedented surveillance, enforcement, and coordination capabilities that eliminate historical instabilities.
- •The risk is assessed as highly neglected compared to its potential scale, with few researchers focused specifically on preventing long-term permanent totalitarianism.
- •Three key conditions are analyzed: whether totalitarian regimes will arise, whether one could dominate globally, and whether such dominance could be permanent.
- •Recommended interventions include AI governance work and research into risks from dangerous concentrations of global power.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| AI Value Lock-in | Risk | 64.0 |
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# Stable totalitarianism: an overview
By 80000_Hours, poppinfresh
Published: 2024-10-29
*We've published this article on stable totalitarianism, which we rank as an "emerging challenge" on* [*our list of pressing world problems*](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/#less-developed-areas) *at 80,000 Hours. Emerging challenges are potentially extremely pressing, but their nature is unclear and the solutions to them are not very developed.*
*We have already updated this article in response to feedback we received after publishing it. Since not a lot has been written about the topic, there's a lot more to learn, and we could easily update our views further. We welcome any additional input.*
* * *
The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia for just four years, yet in that time they murdered [about one-quarter](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1467271032000147041) of Cambodia’s population.
Even short-lived totalitarian regimes can inflict enormous harm. In the 20th century alone, they committed some of the most horrific crimes against humanity in history. In addition to the Cambodian Genocide, these include:
* The Holocaust
* The [Ukrainian Famine](https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor)
* The [Great Leap Forward](https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/chinas-great-leap-forward/)
* The [Cultural Revolution](https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/introduction_to_the_cultural_revolution)
* Repression and [purges](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000271625831700111) across the Soviet Republics
* The [war crimes](https://library.stanford.edu/news/prosecuting-war-criminals-nazi-germany-and-imperial-japan) of Imperial Japan
These events together claimed tens of millions, and perhaps over 100 million, lives. That’s comparable to the combined death count of both world wars (and World War II itself could be added to the list).
Many more people were forced to live in a state of terror and oppression, unable to express themselves and fearing that their lives could be ruined any day.
And that all occurred within a century.
Perhaps even more concerning is the possibility of totalitarian regimes that last a lot longer than that. *Stable totalitarianism* is the idea of a totalitarian regime lasting many millennia, or even in perpetuity.
At first glance, this may seem vanishingly unlikely. While some totalitarian regimes have managed to persist for decades, they have all inevitably succumbed to external forces, internal resistance, or value drift over time.
But future technological developments may help totalitarian leaders overcome these barriers:[^1^](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/risks-of-stable-totalitarianism/#fn-1)
* Autonomous weapons may put entire armies in the hands of one person.[^2^](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/risks-of-stable-totalitarianism/#fn-2)
* Surveillance technology could make it impossible to organise resistance.
* Dictators co
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