Why Should I Assume CCP AGI is Worse Than USG AGI?

Western AI is much more likely to be democratic and have humanity's values a bit higher up. Chinese one is much more likely to put CCP values and control higher up. 

But yes, if it's the current US administration specifically, neither option is that optimistic.

The state of the geopolitical board will influence how the pre-ASI chaos unfolds, and how the pre-ASI AGIs behave. Less plausibly intentions of the humans in charge might influence something about the path-dependent characteristics of ASI (by the time it takes control). But given the state of the "science" and lack of the will to be appropriately cautious and wait a few centuries before taking the leap, it seems more likely that the outcome will be randomly sampled from approximately the same distribution regardless of who sets off the intelligence explosion.

I've also noticed this assumption. I myself don't have it, at all. My first thought has always been something like "If we actually get AGI then preventing terrible outcomes will probably require drastic actions and if anything I have less faith in the US government to take those". Which is a pretty different approach from just assuming that AGI being developed by government $x$ will automatically lead to a world with values of government $x$. But this a very uncertain take and it wouldn't surprise me if someone smart could change my mind pretty quickly.

It seems like it would depend pretty strongly on which side you view as having a closer alignment with human values generally. That probably depends a lot on your worldview and it would be very hard to be unbiased about this.

There was actually a post about almost this exact question [EA · GW] on the EA Forums a while back. You may want to peruse some of the comments there.

I don't think it's possible to align AGI with democracy. AGI, or at least ASI, is an inherently political technology. The power structures that ASI creates within a democratic system would likely destroy the system from within. Whichever group would end up controlling an ASI would get decisive strategic advantage over everyone else within the country, which would undermine the checks and balances that make democracy a democracy.

As things stand today, if AGI is created (aligned or not) in the US, it won't be by the USG or agents of the USG. I'll be by a private or public company. Depending on the path to get there, there will be more or less USG influence of some sort. But if we're going to assume the AGI is aligned to something deliberate, I wouldn't assume AGI built in the US is aligned to the current administration, or at least significantly less so than the degree to which I'd assume AGI built in China by a Chinese company would be aligned to the current CCP. 

For more concrete reasons regarding national ideals, the US has a stronger tradition of self-determination and shifting values over time, plausibly reducing risk of lock-in. It has a stronger tradition (modern conservative politics notwithstanding) of immigration and openness.

In other words, it matters a lot whether the aligned US-built AGI is aligned to the Trump administration, the Constitution, the combined writings of the US founding fathers and renowned leaders and thinkers, the current consensus of the leadership at Google or OpenAI, the overall gestalt opinions of the English-language internet, or something else. I don't have enough understanding to make a similar list of possibilities for China, but some of the things I'd expect it would include don't seem terrible. For example, I don't think a genuinely-aligned Confucian sovereign AGI is anywhere near the worst outcome we could get.

Chinese culture is just less sympathetic in general. China practically has no concept of philanthropy, animal welfare. They are also pretty explicitly ethnonationalist. You don’t hear about these things because the Chinese government has banned dissent and walled off its inhabitants.

However, I think the Hong Kong reunification is going better than I'd expect given the 2019 protests. You'd expect mass social upheaval, but people are just either satisfied or moderately dissatisfied.

I am neither an American citizen nor a Chinese citizen.

does not describe most people who make that argument.

Most of these people are US citizens, or could be. under liberalism/democracy those sorts of people get a say in the future, so  think AGI will be better if it gives those sorts of people a say. 

Most people talking about the USG AGI have structural investments in the US, which are better and give them more chances to bid on not destroying the world. (many are citizens or are in the US block). Since the US government is expected to treat other stakeholders in its previous block better than China treats members of it's block, it is better for people who are only US aligned if the US gets more powerful, since it will probably support its traditional allies even when it is vastly more powerful, as it did during the early cold war. (This was obvious last year and no longer obvious).

In short, the USG was commited to international liberalism, which is a great thing for AGI to have for various reasons which are hard to say, but basically of the form that liberals are commited to not doing crazy stuff. 

People who can't reason well about the CCP's internal ideologies /political conflicts(like me), and predict ideological alignemnt for AGI, think that USG AGI will use the frames of international liberalism (which don't let you get away with terrible things even if you are powerful), and worry about frames of international realism (which they assign to China, since they cannot tell, and argue that if you have the power you must/should/can use it to do anything, including ruining everybody else). 

As a summary, if you are not an american citizen, do not trust the US natsec framing. A lot of this is carryover from times when the US liberal international block (global international order), was stronger, and so as a block framing it is better iff the US block is somehow bigger, which at the time it was. 

We don’t want an ASI to be ”democratic”. We want it to be ”moral”. Many people in the West conflate the two words thinking that democratic and moral is the same thing but it is not. Democracy is a certain system of organizing a state. Morality is how people and (in the future) an ASI behave towards one another.

There are no obvious reasons why an authocratic state would care more or less about a future ASI being immoral, but an argument can be made that autocratic states will be more cautious and put more restrictions on the development of an ASI because autocrats usually fear any kind of opposition and an ASI could be a powerful adversary of itself or in the hands of powerful competitors.

To add to the discussion, my impression is that many people in the US believe they have some moral superiority or know what is good for other people. The whole "we need a manhattan project for AI" discourse is reminiscent of calling for global domination. Also, doing things for the public good is controversial in the US as it can infringe on individual freedom.

This makes me really uncertain as to which AGI would be better (assuming somebody controls it).