I’ve been making a similar point in a kind of distributed fashion for many months, spread out across many comments: that the key factor in world niceness is decentralization—but not decentralization of economic power or productivity (a slave in a diamond mine can be very productive). Rather, the key is decentralization of military potential, and even more specifically, offensive potential. Not defensive. The spreading-out of threat. Democracy being downstream from “it’s easy to teach a peasant to shoot a gun and kill a knight”. You reach that point by the end of the post, and I think it’s the most important thing.
On a related note, I’d like to push back against your idealism over cryptography, and defensive tech in general. In my eyes, defensive tech simply isn’t as strong a force for good. For cryptography in particular, up to a point it suffers from the five dollar wrench problem: it doesn’t actually let you keep a secret from someone stronger. They’ll just beat the secret out of you. You could say citizens can hide the fact that they have a secret at all—but to be immune to things like statistical analysis of behavior, a citizen needs a truly ridiculous amount of opsec. Can you install Tor on your machine and say confidently that nobody knows you did it? Have you thought through what it truly takes? And on the upper levels, we run into the ultimate problem with defensive tech: it can defend bad things, too. Imagine mass torture of simulated beings happening under homomorphic encryption, and the vision of a cryptographically happy world won’t look so happy.
To break through such things, what we really need is dominance of offensive tech, which makes it militarily useful to coopt little guys instead of oppressing them. But then we run smack into the problem that future AI weapons aren’t such a tech, they’re the opposite: empowering the bigger guy beyond all reason. And there the wheels fall off, I have no idea how to continue thinking optimistically past that point. The future just looks like tyranny no matter what.
Democracy being downstream from “it’s easy to teach a peasant to shoot a gun and kill a knight”.
It seems to me that the consequence of this principle is civil or guerrilla war, examples of which are Samali or Afghanistan. The principle of democracy is a little different: it is easy to teach a peasant to mass-produce guns, which will make him a skilled worker, mass production of ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads required even more skilled workers, engineers, and scientists, who suddenly began to wonder whether dictatorship and nuclear conflict were so good; perhaps it might be better to use rocket technology to explore space or fight for peace like one of the creators of the hydrogen bomb, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov? Educated people are very harmful to any state, because they decentralize technology the most.
what we really need is dominance of offensive tech, which makes it militarily useful to coopt little guys instead of oppressing them
Growing technological power increases society’s external resilience, but it also increases the threats associated with the short-sighted use of new technological capabilities. The sense of omnipotence and impunity, the illusion of limitless resources for extensive growth, and the thirst for “small victorious wars” intensify. As a result, social violence and uncompensated environmental destruction increase, and society becomes increasingly dependent on fluctuations in public sentiment, the decisions of authoritative leaders, and so on, thereby reducing its internal resilience. This resilience is restored when and if increased instrumental power is compensated for by improved cultural and psychological regulators.
Well, that’s basically what we’re observing: the storming of the Capitol, “zero tolerance policy”, the arrest of Maduro as a kind of “small victorious war” — all of this has become possible thanks to the dominance of offensive technology. I’m even curious to see what will happen next.
For cryptography in particular, up to a point it suffers from the five dollar wrench problem
Why so much unnecessary cruelty? Cryptocurrency is the perfect vehicle for bribery. The Venezuelan Vice President’s coin account was replenished with a tidy sum after she ratted out her boss and only thanks to cryptography!
all of this has become possible thanks to the dominance of offensive technology
I used to think that way too, but now I think it’s the other way around. The strong can always hurt the weak somehow, that’s just a fact of life, offense/defense ratio doesn’t change it much either way. But for the strong to hurt the weak with impunity, it’s necessary that the weak can’t hurt the strong right back. In other words, it depends mainly on the strong’s defensive tech, or the weak’s lack of offensive tech.
The logic here is somewhat different—you can’t just buy a nuke off the shelf. If Venezuela were to have a nuclear program, its development would follow the Iraq or Iran scenario, and in the end there still would be no nuclear weapons. All nuclear powers adhere to the principle of No First Use. If Venezuela were developing nuclear weapons in order to follow the same principle, that would be money down the drain, because the United States would defeat Venezuela in a conventional war without being the first to use nuclear weapons.
From this follows a logical conclusion: Venezuela does not intend to include No First Use in its doctrine. This increases the risk for the entire world; therefore, in separate negotiations the nuclear powers would agree that depriving Venezuela of the ability to create nuclear weapons would be a step toward strengthening global security.
Furthermore, any oil that could be used in the production of a first‑strike nuclear weapon must be seized from such a state. Since the world is far from ideal, national security policy has to be based on worst‑case assumptions.
Security operates by different rules than business: cooperation is not assumed.
I’ve been making a similar point in a kind of distributed fashion for many months, spread out across many comments: that the key factor in world niceness is decentralization—but not decentralization of economic power or productivity (a slave in a diamond mine can be very productive). Rather, the key is decentralization of military potential, and even more specifically, offensive potential. Not defensive. The spreading-out of threat. Democracy being downstream from “it’s easy to teach a peasant to shoot a gun and kill a knight”. You reach that point by the end of the post, and I think it’s the most important thing.
On a related note, I’d like to push back against your idealism over cryptography, and defensive tech in general. In my eyes, defensive tech simply isn’t as strong a force for good. For cryptography in particular, up to a point it suffers from the five dollar wrench problem: it doesn’t actually let you keep a secret from someone stronger. They’ll just beat the secret out of you. You could say citizens can hide the fact that they have a secret at all—but to be immune to things like statistical analysis of behavior, a citizen needs a truly ridiculous amount of opsec. Can you install Tor on your machine and say confidently that nobody knows you did it? Have you thought through what it truly takes? And on the upper levels, we run into the ultimate problem with defensive tech: it can defend bad things, too. Imagine mass torture of simulated beings happening under homomorphic encryption, and the vision of a cryptographically happy world won’t look so happy.
To break through such things, what we really need is dominance of offensive tech, which makes it militarily useful to coopt little guys instead of oppressing them. But then we run smack into the problem that future AI weapons aren’t such a tech, they’re the opposite: empowering the bigger guy beyond all reason. And there the wheels fall off, I have no idea how to continue thinking optimistically past that point. The future just looks like tyranny no matter what.
It seems to me that the consequence of this principle is civil or guerrilla war, examples of which are Samali or Afghanistan. The principle of democracy is a little different: it is easy to teach a peasant to mass-produce guns, which will make him a skilled worker, mass production of ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads required even more skilled workers, engineers, and scientists, who suddenly began to wonder whether dictatorship and nuclear conflict were so good; perhaps it might be better to use rocket technology to explore space or fight for peace like one of the creators of the hydrogen bomb, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov? Educated people are very harmful to any state, because they decentralize technology the most.
Growing technological power increases society’s external resilience, but it also increases the threats associated with the short-sighted use of new technological capabilities. The sense of omnipotence and impunity, the illusion of limitless resources for extensive growth, and the thirst for “small victorious wars” intensify. As a result, social violence and uncompensated environmental destruction increase, and society becomes increasingly dependent on fluctuations in public sentiment, the decisions of authoritative leaders, and so on, thereby reducing its internal resilience. This resilience is restored when and if increased instrumental power is compensated for by improved cultural and psychological regulators.
Well, that’s basically what we’re observing: the storming of the Capitol, “zero tolerance policy”, the arrest of Maduro as a kind of “small victorious war” — all of this has become possible thanks to the dominance of offensive technology. I’m even curious to see what will happen next.
Why so much unnecessary cruelty? Cryptocurrency is the perfect vehicle for bribery. The Venezuelan Vice President’s coin account was replenished with a tidy sum after she ratted out her boss and only thanks to cryptography!
I used to think that way too, but now I think it’s the other way around. The strong can always hurt the weak somehow, that’s just a fact of life, offense/defense ratio doesn’t change it much either way. But for the strong to hurt the weak with impunity, it’s necessary that the weak can’t hurt the strong right back. In other words, it depends mainly on the strong’s defensive tech, or the weak’s lack of offensive tech.
The logic here is somewhat different—you can’t just buy a nuke off the shelf. If Venezuela were to have a nuclear program, its development would follow the Iraq or Iran scenario, and in the end there still would be no nuclear weapons. All nuclear powers adhere to the principle of No First Use. If Venezuela were developing nuclear weapons in order to follow the same principle, that would be money down the drain, because the United States would defeat Venezuela in a conventional war without being the first to use nuclear weapons.
From this follows a logical conclusion: Venezuela does not intend to include No First Use in its doctrine. This increases the risk for the entire world; therefore, in separate negotiations the nuclear powers would agree that depriving Venezuela of the ability to create nuclear weapons would be a step toward strengthening global security.
Furthermore, any oil that could be used in the production of a first‑strike nuclear weapon must be seized from such a state. Since the world is far from ideal, national security policy has to be based on worst‑case assumptions.
Security operates by different rules than business: cooperation is not assumed.