Consent across power differentials

I'm surprised by the list of forms of power by what it leaves out.

A stereotypical example of power differences is bosses having relationships with their employees.

The boss has power over a different domain of the life of the employee than the domain of the relationship.

It's the problem of corruption where power from one domain leaks into a different domain where it doesn't belong.

If there's an option to advance one's career by sleeping with one's boss, that makes it issues of consent more tricky. Career incentives might pressure a person in the relationship even if they wouldn't want to be in it otherwise.

You can make make people/entities actually equal. You can also remove the need for the weaker entity to get the stronger entities permission. Either go more egalitarian or less authoritarian or both. Its worth noting that if you dont want to be authoritarian its important to blin yourself to information about the weaker party. The ebst way to not be overbearing is to not know what behavior they are getting up to. This is why children's privacy is so important. Its much easier to never known than to resist your urge to meddle.

I have yet to see a good rationalist or even very careful thoughtful treatment of individual or group power disparities.  It's especially difficult for changing situations (children who will increase in self-determination, elderly who are decreasing, and drunk or drugged people who may or may not be more aware in the next encounter).

In none of those cases can (or should) the power differential be removed.  It needs to be accepted and incorporated into behaviors and attitudes.  Honestly, this is the hard (and possibly unsolvable) question for AI alignment - when another entitity is smarter and more powerful than me, how do I want it to think of "for my own good"?

This is a super interesting and important problem, IMO.  I believe it already has significant real world practical consequences, e.g. powerful people find it difficult to avoid being surrounded by sychophants: even if they really don't want to be, that's just an extra constraint for the sychophants to satisfy ("don't come across as sychophantic")!  I am inclined to agree that avoiding power differentials is the only way to really avoid these perverse outcomes in practice, and I think this is a good argument in favor of doing so.

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This is also quite related to an (old, unpublished) work I did with Jonathan Binas on "bounded empowerment".  I've invited you to the Overleaf (it needs to clean-up, but I've also asked Jonathan about putting it on arXiv).
 
To summarize: Let's consider this in the case of a superhuman AI, R, and a human H.  The basic idea of that work is that R should try and "empower" H, and that (unlike in previous works on empowerment), there are two ways of doing this:
1) change the state of the world (as in previous works)
2) inform H so they know how to make use of the options available to them to achieve various ends (novel!)

If R has a perfect model of H and the world, then you can just compute how to effectively do these things (it's wildly intractable, ofc).  I think this would still often look "patronizing" in practice, and/or maybe just lead to totally wild behaviors (hard to predict this sort of stuff...), but it might be a useful conceptual "lead".

Random thought OTMH: Something which might make it less "patronizing" is if H were to have well-defined "meta-preferences" about how such interactions should work that R could aim to respect.  

Conversation about such decisions has to happen in the best common language available. This is very obvious with animals, where teaching them human language requires far more effort from everyone than learning how they already communicate and meeting them on their own intellectual turf.

Also, it's rare to have only a single isolated power differential in play. There are usually several, pointing in different directions. Draft animals can destroy stuff and injure people if they panic; pets can destroy their owners' possessions. Oppressed human populations can revolt; oppressed individuals can rebel in all kinds of creatively dangerous ways. In the rare event of dealing with only a single power gradient at once, being on top is easy because you decide what you're doing and then you do it and it works. But with multiple power gradients simultaneously in play, staying "on top" is a high-effort process and a good-faith negotiation can only happen when every participant puts in the effort to not be a jerk in the areas where their power happens to exceed that of others.

Suppose that the more powerful being is aligned to the less powerful: that is to say that (as should be the case in the babysitting example you give) the more powerful being's fundamental motive is the well-being of the less powerful being.. Assume also that a lot of the asymmetry is of intellectual capacity: the more powerful being is also a great deal smarter. I think the likely and correct outcome is that there isn't always consent, the less powerful being is frequently being manipulated into actions and reactions that they haven't actually consented to, and might not even be capable of realizing why they should consent to — but ones that, if they were as intellectually capable as the more powerful being, they would in fact consent to.

I also think that,. for situations where the less powerful being is able to understand the alternatives and make an rational and informed decision, and wants to, the more powerful should give them the option and let them do so.. That's the polite, respectful way to do things But often that isn't going to be practical, or desirable. and the baby sitter should just distract the baby before they get into the dangerous situation.

Consent is a concept that fundamentally assumes that I am the best person available to make decisions about my own well-being. Outside parental situations, for interactions between evolved intelligence like humans, that's almost invariably true. But if I had a superintelligence aligned to me, then yes, I would want it to keep me away from dangers so complex that I'm not capable of making an informed decision about them.