Racism
Most racism is an echo from times when resources were more scarce. Fear of the other is one of the reasons there are no more dirty Denisovans or Neanderthals around eating our food and taking up space. And if we all started in Africa, racism in mate selection must have played a big part in giving us white races more able to survive cold winters and limited sun exposure. A brutal mechanism used by evolution which doesn’t really care about any of us personally. Not in the way we are capable of caring about each other.
As a society, we are still more brutal than we need to be. We don’t mind leaving a drug addict on the side of the road or executing a murderer. Racism is only looked down on because it is inefficient, a vice of the failson. You can’t know whether a person is elite or not by looking at their skin or their mannerisms alone. There are many similar signaling mechanisms at work today to separate the more from the less capable in a similarly brutal fashion, but they are all only a shadow of the ideal that we will have to deal with as a result of more advanced machine intelligence.
Machine intelligence will allow for a completely bespoke kind of racism. One where it can account for every aspect of you as a human being in making a life or death decision about you and can give you a chain of reasoning which is more thorough and well reasoned than anything you could produce in your lifetime. And that is going to be the best choice we have, much better than the current system which does the same thing but in a completely opaque and poorly reasoned manner.
That will lead to new kinds of in groups. It stands to reason that different races and cultures are making well reasoned tradeoffs, consciously or unconsciously, and that there are elites of those different races. A sufficiently advanced machine intelligence will be able to put numbers to those tradeoffs and identify those elite individuals. It will also be able to identify elite individuals who would be a part of a given elite race if not for superficial signals which resulted in them being filtered out. The more coarse filtering will no longer be necessary.
Since computers will be able to make inferences on their own measurements about potential offspring of a given couple, those measurements will play a part in mate selection. That is the mechanism by which the elite groups will be further refined. It will be without any more respect to skin color or other physical feature than is warranted by the correlations which accidentally exist today.
It’s also reasonable to be worried that this could lead to singular eternal powers which abuse everyone below them. The mechanism which prevents that is an acknowledgement of our failings. That acknowledgement is enabled by open and honest measurements. No individual person or group can be trusted with absolute power because one mistake by that person can lead to the total destruction.
This is also how we should approach deference to computers. If you don’t continue to consider every decision yourself to the best of your ability, you are giving a computer absolute power over your life. The implication of the above is that people who do this will naturally be outcompeted. It’s not something that has to be enforced with any personal or societal mechanism of power. We’ll have to confront the brutality of our situation in a way we never have, but the reward for that can be prosperity we haven’t experienced in living memory.