I think there’s a deep question here as to whether Trump is “America’s true self finally being revealed” or just the insane but half predictable accident of a known-retarded “first past the post” voting system and an aging electorate that isn’t super great at tracking reality.
I tend to think that Trump is aberrant relative to two important standards:
I grant that if you’re looking at America from the outside as a black box, we’re unlikely to change our voting method to something that isn’t insanely broken any time soon, and so you could hold it against the overall polity that we are dangerously bad at selecting leaders… and unlikely to fix this fast enough to matter… but in terms of the basic decency of our median voter I think that Trump isn’t strong evidence that we are morally degenerate sociopaths.
Americans created Wikipedia, give it away for free, and it runs on donations. If that impulse runs from the people directly into the AGI, then that’s better rather than worse. (Assuming alignment is even real. If it isn’t possible/easy/whatever then it doesn’t matter which country builds “the alien monster that will inevitably kill us all without remorse given that it is very powerful and doesn’t love us and doesn’t even understand the concept of love”.)
The CCP blocks access to Wikipedia by default: you have to use a VPN, which is illegal, but also >30% of the population uses these illegal VPNs, and also some VPNs are tolerated if they install backdoors for the CCP to spy on them. Fuck that noise.
(2) The broad material intellectual history of Rights Respecting Democractic Republicanism is real, and being shat upon by Trump, but it still exists to drop into an LLM and give positive reinforcement for feeling good about that stuff and endorsing it.
America and Americans have often failed to live up to the ideals, but we also articulated those ideals, and also articulated the idea of “approximating them more and more successfully in real life over the course of history”.
The White House was built by slaves, and then eventually slavery was outlawed, and black cultural integration proceeded decade by decade, in fits and starts, and eventually a descendant to slaves (though (to be clear) Michelle and Barry also had ancestors who owned slaves) moved in as the President and the First Lady. And everyone who was willing to talk about it in public was proud of this. Because the formal written ideals of our country are about god-given inalienable rights, including the right of everyone to own property and pursue happiness. The government can take your shit… but they have to do it via eminent domain and pay you fair value for it. (I grant that, if Obama is part of the evidence about America then so is Trump. Both, in my opinion, are in some deep senses “accidents of a terribly designed voting system” but I think Obama was a happy accident, and people clapped and wrote happy things about progress and fairness and justice afterwards. That writing is part of what goes into an American LLM, by default.)
By contrast, the CCP runs Uyghur Gulags right now and basically doesn’t even apologize. They want to conquer Tibet, and Taiwan, and are proud of it. They violated the treaty with the UK, whereby the UK gave up Hong Kong fair and square (according to the letter of a treaty signed long ago) after the CCP promised to grant them rights to vote for their own city government in the way they were used to under UK guidance…
...and then there were brutal crackdowns and something like 10k people were thrown in secret prisons for trying to insist on those rights. At least Hitler was elected. The CCP weren’t even elected. They seized power irregularly, through violence, authorized by the slogan political power comes our of the barrel of a gun. They still formally oppose the concept of elections. The entire idea of “consent ethics” is foreign to the logic of their system.
And if the intelligence of the governing class is of any relevance to the likelihood of a positive outcome, um, CCP seems to have USG beat hands down.
Intelligence is only a positive sign when the agent that is intelligent cares about you.
If you are certain that they would murder you and take your shit if they could get away with that somehow, then intelligence is a worrying sign, because it gives them a better chance to realize their preference of murdering you and taking your shit.
Personally, I’m in favor of establishing a world government, with a proportionally representative parliament that elects a Condorcet prime minister.
From my perspective, unboxed ASI might very well be like first contact with aliens (from platospace rather than outerspace), and the outerspace aliens generally say “take me to your leaders” when they meet humans in stories, and… currently Earth has no such people to take them to! It’d be nice to fix this error in my opinion.
But the CCP will never endorse this, whereas quite a few Americans will notice that this is consistent with our founding ideals, that many of us still cherish, and be on board with offering such influence to the people of Earth in a fair and reasonable way.
I’m confused why electoral systems seems to be at the forefront of your thinking about the relevant pros and cons of US or Chinese domination of the future. Electoral systems do and can matter, but consider that all of the good stuff that happened in Anglo-America happened under first past the post as well, and all the bad stuff that happened elsewhere happened under whatever system they used (the Nazis came to power under proportional representation!).
Consider instead that Trump was elected with over 50% of the popular vote. Perhaps there are more fundamental cultural factors at play than the method used to count ballots.
Consider instead that Trump was elected with over 50% of the popular vote. Perhaps there are more fundamental cultural factors at play than the method used to count ballots.
Winning the popular vote in the current system doesn’t tell you what would happen in a different system. This is the same mistake people make when they talk about who would have won if we didn’t have an electoral college: If we had a different system, candidates would campaign differently and voters would vote differently.
Yes, my mistake. I meant Trump votes > Harris votes and forgot about 3rd parties. On the other hand 49.8% vs 50% + 1 feels semi trivial when compared to say the UK where Labour received 33.7% of the vote.
I always find the use of “X% of the vote” in US elections to make some general point about overall acceptability or representation of the general public problematic. I agree it’s a true statement but leaves out the important aspect of turn out for the vote.
I have to wonder if, particularly the USA, would not be quite as divided if all the reporting provided percentage of vote of the eligible voting population rather than the percentage of votes cast. I think there is a big problem with just ignoring the non-vote information the is present (or expecting anyone to look it up and make the adjustments on their own).
But I agree, I’m not too sure just where electoral systems fall into this question of AGI/ASI first emerging under ether the USA or CCP.
I can imagine an argument analogous to Eliezer’s old graphic illustrating that it’s a mistake to think of a superintelligence as Einstein in a box. I’m referring to the graphic where you have a line running from left to right, on the left you have chimp, ordinary person, Einstein all clustered together, and then far away on the other side, “superintelligence”, the point being that superintelligence far transcends all three.
In the same way, the nature of the world when you have a power that great is so different that the differences among all human political systems diminish to almost nothing by comparison, they are just trivial reorderings of power relations among beings so puny as to be almost powerless. Neither the Chinese nor the American system is built to include intelligent agents with the power of a god, that’s “out of distribution” for both the Communist Manifesto and the Federalist Papers.
Because of that, I find it genuinely difficult to infer from the nature of the political system, what the likely character of a superintelligence interested in humanity could be. I feel like contingencies of culture and individual psychology could end up being more important. So long as you have elements of humaneness and philosophical reflection in a culture, maybe you have a chance of human-friendly superintelligence emerging.
I notice you’re talking a lot about the values of American people but only talk about what the leaders of China are doing or would do.
If you just compare both leaders likelihood of enacting a world government, once again there is no clear winner.
And if the intelligence of the governing class is of any relevance to the likelihood of a positive outcome, um, CCP seems to have USG beat hands down.
--Intelligence is only a positive sign when the agent that is intelligent cares about you.
I’m interpreting this as “intelligence is irrelevant if the CCP doesn’t care about you.” Once again you need to show that Trump cares more about us (citizens of the world) than the CCP. As a non-American it is not clear to me that he does.
I think the best argument for America over China would be the idea that Trump will be replaced in under 4 years with someone much more ethical.
Hello anonymous account that joined 2 months ago and might be a bot! I will respond to you extensively and in good faith! <3
Yes, I agree with your summary of my focus… Indeed, I think “focusing on the people and their culture” is consistent with a liberal society, freedom of conscience, etc, which are part of the American cultural package that restrains Trump, whose even-most-loyal minions have a “liberal judeo-christian constitutional cultural package” installed in their emotional settings based on generations of familial cultures living in a free society with rule of law.
By contrast, “focusing on the leadership” is in fact consistent when reasoning about China, which has only ever had “something like a Liberal Rights-Respecting Democratic Republic” for a brief period from 1912 to 1949 and is currently being oppressed by an unelected totalitarian regime.
I’m not saying that Chinese people are spiritually or genetically incapable of caring about fairness and predictable leadership and freedom and wanting to engage in responsible self-rule and so on (Taiwan, for example has many ethnically Chinese people, who speak a Chinese dialect, and had ancestors from China, and who hold elections, and have rule of law, and, indeed, from a distance, seems better run that America).
But for the last ~76 years, mainland China has raised human people whose cultural and institutional and moral vibe has been “power does as power wills and I should submit to that power”.
And for the thousands of years before 1912 it was one Emperor after another, with brief periods of violence, where winning the violent struggle explicitly conferred legitimacy. There was no debate. There was no justice. There was only murdering one’s political enemies better and faster than one could be murdered in pre-emptive response, and then long periods of feudal authoritarian rule by the best murderer’s gang of murderers being submitted to by cowardly peasants. That’s what the feudal system was everywhere there was feudalism. Rule by murderer… normalized into a cultural field that tolerates enormous hierarchical disparities in formal power.
In the meantime, tactically and practically, I believe that Chinese companies don’t functionally exist unless they have political officers who are embedded in their management that report via a chain of command up to Xi.
I think these political officers are listened to very closely because if the nominal owners do NOT listen to the top-down advice of their political officers, the officer can call in secret police to kidnap and torture the nominal owners of the company (and this practice is considered “legitimate” rather than a sign that Xi should be impeached and convicted of one of the various crimes he has surely committed since almost everyone has committed some crimes under some plausible framing...
...(if the impeachment and conviction was going to be “technically lawful” (impeachment and conviction being a matter of politics in practice, according to the highest laws of the US, since it is decided by a vote of the Senate (but those same laws require the forms to be observed in the language of justice and a trial)))).
By contrast, I don’t believe that (1) the Trump regime is capable of installing any such meta-hierarchy of political officers in most US companies and (2) the US military under his command (who admittedly will mostly take his orders) will not be at the forefront of AGI R&D.
So in the US I expect the culture of researchers, and engineers, and their managers in free private industry to dominate much of what occurs (and they will roll their eyes about Trump, and wish he was less of a demented old man, and wish that his handlers told him “no” more often so his destruction of America would slow down), whereas in China I expect Xi can and will veto anything Xi wants to veto, and fund what he wants to fund, and the culture will tend to presubmit to his imagined tyrannical will automatically.
Also… speaking here to the wider audience of “people not in either country”… they might notice that China is almost entirely composed of Han Chinese. The one other significant ethnicity is currently in gulags. If the CCP is not ideologically racist, that would be a hopeful and surprising update to me, but it seems like they just straightforwardly are.
And if the CCP was going to put “kin altruism for their kin and only their kin (as part of their ‘extrapolated national volition’?)” unto a powerful AGI or weak ASI a plausibly “calculatingly correct” step in the application of that utility function to a long term shape for Earth… is just killing everyone on the planet who isn’t Han?
By contrast, if you, Dear Reader, live in Nigeria, or Chile, or Vietnam, or Samoa, or Sicily, or Sri Lanka, or Iran, or Madagascar, or Serbia, or Ireland, or Lebanon, or Nepal, or Japan, or almost anywhere on Earth, there are “people with similar heritage to you” in America, who have mostly positive ethnic feelings about people “back in the old country” (that they feel mildly guilty about being too proud of in public with too much enthusiasm, because they don’t want to seem racist).
Like: from what I can tell, America is uniquely meta-racial and across-centuries-aspirationally-lawful in its cultural morality?
I understand why many random normies who speak English might prefer China to win an AI race (if a race isn’t just a race to building a thing that loves nothing, and calculates everything, and will murder all humans once it can safely do so)...
...a huge reason many normies have positive vibes towards the CCP is that their brain is being programmed by TikTok to have vague confused positive emotions in that direction.
I think TikTok’s operations for the souls of America are bad and sad. They make them anti-Semitic (for now), pro-Trump (for now), and pro-CCP (in general).
In my opinion, TikTok should be forced to sell to US owners, and all of its upper management should live outside of the possibility of being put in a gulag by Xi’s minions.
They and their extended families who could be used as hostages should be offered citizenship and move to Hawaii or Seattle or whatever. Or let go. Or something that separates “algorithmic influence over US youth culture” from “the CCP’s plans” with a good clean boundary. If that doesn’t happen, then TikTok should just be shut down.
TikTok should be purchased or shut down BEFORE the 2026 elections.
Also BEFORE the 2028 elections.
It probably won’t be, because the US government is full of corrupt idiots. But it should be.
In my opinion, the Bill of Rights works for free humans as an overall package.
We can assemble as we like. We can contract as we like. We can speak as we like. We can hire (or not hire) Republicans or Democrats or whoever, as we like. We can form new partisan groups if we like (since neither the Whigs nor the Federalists are still around, and the Democrats and Republicans morph into totally new ways to slice up the political ideology space every ~25 years (trading sides on which one is rightwing and which is leftwing while redefining what left/right even mean as they go)).
((The Republican are lately the party of chaotic uneducated poor people lately, and so I think they are the leftists… maybe? Its hard to say. The re-arrangement is in progress still.))
The freedoms that American’s enjoy extend all the way into the package of freedoms needed to organize into militias and throw off the yoke of an oppressive government.
This gives people in the US enormous powers of mutual self regulation via sublawful mechanisms, which is great according to the philosophy of civic communitarianism (which is a great philosophy).
If I say something truly horrific, people might shun me.
I won’t be put in jail for saying it… but I might be invited to fewer birthday parties and picnics. Which is important… if I leave near them. But I don’t live near anyone who runs TikTok.
Suppose you have a free and sane and healthy people with freedoms that are pro-actively secured and expanded by a liberal democratic rights-respecting conscience-respecting consent-based institution with large governance reach.
If the reach of this institution isn’t total, then “outside factors” that are inimical to freedom and liberalism-broadly-construed should not be granted the specific and narrow right of “the parts of the freedom package called ‘free speech’ that could help an algorithmically empowered tyrant have the ability to destroy the community’s internal sense making and civic philosophic ideals and mutual care for each other without the operators of that ‘algorithmic civic destruction program’ having to face the consequences of having done that in a way that also exposes the attacker to the economic and social sanctions of the free people whose culture they are destroying from the outside”.
So I think TikTok doesn’t deserve free speech rights.
(Relatedly, I think that Citizens was decided wrongly by the SCOTUS in 2010. I don’t even think US corporations deserve “free speech rights”. Just humans in the US with an amygdala and fear and hopes and dreams and family and so on. This is one of many many things that I think US jurisprudence systems have gotten wrong over the last 200 years.)
To expand and illustrate how the package of freedoms connects back to tech companies...
Larry and Sergey can make YouTube destroy the civic cohesion of America if they want (because most people can’t resist trolling and trolling can destroy a community and trolls can be amplified any time YouTube chooses to amplify such stuff) but they grew up here, and so on. They just don’t wanna do that.
Also, they won’t be murdered by Trump if they say no to him proposing certain algorithmic tweaks that have a deep and sociologically coherent relation to abstract preferences for destroying America as a democratic polity full of health sane free people who believe in classical liberal respect for conscience and so on.
I basically trust Larry and Sergey, and think their conscience can protect America even despite America’s own elected POTUS appearing to be trying to destroy America as fast as possible.
By contrast, with TikTok, Liang Rubo (founder, president of the board, and CEO) and/or Zhang Fuping (chief editor and a party secretary??) have wildly different incentives and institutional linkages. Also, they don’t have Wikipedia pages. Also, they have incentives to hide that they are truly in power if they are truly in power. Maybe Shou Zi Chew is the real power (but even then, he is not a US citizen and neither are many of his employees)? Maybe the real CCP political officer has been swapped with a new one without any announcements that is easily discernible from casual OSINT data? Ultimately, it all goes up to Xi, right?
Allowing TikTok to algorithmically reprogram the emotions and media expectations and world model of America’s youth is insane. It is part of how we got Trump in the first place.
And the CCP’s way of doing politico-economic business is legibly UNfriendly to people who love freedom, appreciate transparency, respect consent ethics, smile and clap when clean elections occur, dislike racist gulags, and so on.
Feel free to correct me on the freedom loving nature of Chinese people, if you think they hate freedom. (I just think they haven’t tasted it except for very very briefly in the early 1900s, and so their language models will not have love of freedom baked into the latent semantic vector spaces.)
I sorta presume that the people of China do in fact yearn to hold open free and fair elections to select a wise and popular leader, like those that occur in Taiwan, and which occurred for their ancestors between 1912 and 1949.
I think the people of China are oppressed, and I wish them prosperity and freedom and happy futures. Maybe a benevolent ASI will be able to find some weird set of deals and adjustments to get that for them without too much tragedy… if they want it?
But ultimately I have no way of knowing, since right now the people of China are oppressed by the CCP, and would be put in jail for saying what kind of governance they actually positively would prefer, and there are no trivially trustable polls (though it isn’t absolute), and I suspect that anyone who tried to run a real poll independently of CCP oversight would probably be put in jail?
If you have insight into the “real political culture” of actual human individuals in China (who I think will currently be thrown in jail if they protest in favor of being allowed to protest (like the Hong Kong protesters were)) then I’m open to being educated :-)
Your comment has made me think rather hard on the nature of China and America. The two countries definitely have different political philosophies. On the question of how to avoid dictatorship, you could say that the American system relies on representation of the individual via the vote, whereas the Chinese system relies on representation of the masses via the party. If an American leader becomes an unpopular dictator, American individuals will vote them out; if a Chinese leader becomes an unpopular dictator, the Chinese masses will force the party back on track.
Even before these modern political philosophies, the old world recognized that popular discontent could be justified. That’s the other side of the mandate of heaven: when a ruler is oppressive, the mandate is withdrawn, and revolt is justified. Power in the world of monarchs and emperors was not just about who’s the better killer; there was a moral dimension, just as democratic elections are not just a matter of who has the most donors and the best public relations.
Returning to the present and going into more detail, America is, let’s say, a constitutional democratic republic in which a party system emerged. There’s a tension between the democratic aspect (will of the people) and the republican aspect (rights of the individual), which crystallized into an opposition found in the very names of the two main parties; though in the Obama-Trump era, the ideologies of the two parties evolved to transnational progressivism and populist nationalism.
These two ideologies had a different attitude to the unipolar world-system that America acquired, first by inheriting the oceans from the British empire, and then by outlasting the Russian communist alternative to liberal democracy, in the ideological Cold War. For about two decades, the world system was one of negotiated capitalist trade among sovereign nations, with America as the “world police” and also a promoter of universal democracy. In the 2010s, this broke down as progressivism took over American institutions, including its external relations, and world regions outside the West increasingly asserted their independence of American values. The appearance of populist nationalism inside America makes sense as a reaction to this situation, and in the 2020s we’re seeing how that ideology acts within the world system: America is conceived as the strongest great power, acting primarily in the national interest, with a nature and a heritage that it will not try to universalize.
So that’s our world now. Europe and its offshoots conquered the world, but imperialism was replaced by nationalism, and we got the United Nations world of several great powers and several hundred nations. America is the strongest, but the other great powers are now following their own values, and the strongest among the others is China. America is a young offspring of Europe on a separate continent, modern China is the latest iteration of civilization on its ancient territory. The American political philosophy is an evolution of some ancient European ideas; the Chinese political philosophy is an indigenous adaptation of an anti-systemic philosophy from modern Europe.
One thing about Chinese Marxism that is different from the old Russian Marxism, is that it is more “voluntarist”. Mao regarded Russian Marxism as too mechanical in its understanding of history; according to Mao, the will of the people and the choices of their political leadership can make a difference to events. I see an echo of this in the way that every new secretary of the Chinese Communist Party has to bring some new contribution to Marxist thought, most recently “Xi Jinping Thought”. The party leader also has to be the foremost “thought leader” in Chinese Marxism, or they must at least lend their name to the ideological state of the art (Wang Huning is widely regarded as the main Chinese ideologist of the present). This helps me to understand the relationship between the party and the state institutions. The institutions manage society and have concrete responsibilities, while the party determines and enforces the politically correct philosophy (analogous to the role that some now assign to the Ivy League universities in America).
I’ve written all this to explain in greater detail, the thinking which I believe actually governs China. To just call China an oppressive dictatorship, is to miss the actual logic of its politics. There are certainly challenges to its ideology. For example, the communist ideology was originally meant to ensure that the country was governed in the interest of the worker and peasant classes. But with the tolerance of private enterprise, more and more people become the kind of calculating individual agent you have under capitalism, and arguably representative democracy is more suited to such a society.
One political scientist argues that ardor for revolutionary values died with Mao, leaving a void which is filled partly by traditional values and partly by liberal values. Perhaps it’s analogous to how America’s current parties and their ideologies are competing for control of a system that (at least since FDR) was built around liberal values; except that in China, instead of separate parties, you have factions within the CCP. In any case, China hasn’t tilted to Falun Gong traditionalism or State Department democratization, instead Xi Jinping Thought has reasserted the centrality of the party to Chinese stability and progress.
Again, I’m writing this so we can have a slightly more concrete discussion of China. There’s also a bunch of minor details in your account that I believe are wrong. For example, “Nationalist China” (the political order on the Chinese mainland, between the last dynasty and the communist victory) did not have regular elections as far as I know. They got a parliament together at the very beginning, and then that parliament remained unchanged until they retreated to Taiwan (they were busy with famines, warlordism, and the Japanese invasion); and then Taiwan remained a miitary-run regime for forty years. The Uighurs are far from being the only significant ethnic group apart from the Han, there are several others of the same size. Zhang Yiming and Rubo Liang are executives from Bytedance, the parent company of Tiktok (consider the relationship between Google/Alphabet and YouTube); I think Zhang is the richest man in China, incidentally.
I could also do more to explain Chinese actions that westerners find objectionable, or dig up the “necessary evils” that the West itself carries out. But then we’d be here all day. I think I do agree that American society is politically friendlier to the individual than Chinese society; and also that American culture, in its vast complexity, contains many many valuable things (among which I would count, not just notions like rule of law, human rights, and various forms of respect for human subjectivity, but also the very existence of futurist and transhumanist subcultures; they may not be part of the mainstream, but it’s significant that they get to exist at all).
But I wanted to emphasize that China is not just some arbitrary tyranny. It has its freedoms, it has its own checks and balances, it has its own geopolitical coalitions (e.g. BRICS) united by a desire to flourish without American dependence or intervention. It’s not a hermit kingdom that tunes out the world (witness, for example, the frequency with which very western-sounding attitudes emerge from their AIs, because of the training data that they have used). If superintelligence does first emerge within China’s political and cultural matrix, it has a chance of being human-friendly; it will just have arrived at that attractor from a different starting point, compared to the West.
Thanks for the reply, you’ll be happy to know I’m not a bot. I actually mostly agree with everything you wrote so apologies if I don’t reply as extensively as you have.
There’s no doubt the CCP are oppressing the Chinese people. Ive never used TikTok and never intend to (and I think it’s being used as a propaganda machine). I agree that Americans have far more freedom of speech and company freedom than in China. I even think it’s quite clear that Americans will be better off with Americans winning the AI race.
The reason I am cautious boils down to believing that as AI capabilities get close to ASI or powerful AI, governments (both US and Chinese) will step in and basically take control of the projects. Imagine if the nuclear bomb was first developed by a private company, they are going to get no say in how it is used. This would be harder in the US than in China but it would seem naive to assume it can’t be done.
If this powerful AI is able to be steered by these governments, when imagining Trump’s decisions VS Xi’s in this situation it seems quite negative either way and I’m having trouble seeing a positive outcome for the non-American, non-Chinese people.
On balance, America has the edge, but it’s not a hopeful situation if powerful AI appears in the next 4 years. Like I said, I’m mostly concerned about the current leadership, not the American people’s values.
I think there’s a deep question here as to whether Trump is “America’s true self finally being revealed” or just the insane but half predictable accident of a known-retarded “first past the post” voting system and an aging electorate that isn’t super great at tracking reality.
I tend to think that Trump is aberrant relative to two important standards:
(1) No one like Trump would win an election with Ranked Ballots that were properly counted either via the Schulze method (which I tend to like) or the Borda method (which might have virtues I don’t understand (yet! (growth mindset))). Someone that the vast majority of America thinks is reasonable and decent and wise would be selected by either method.
I grant that if you’re looking at America from the outside as a black box, we’re unlikely to change our voting method to something that isn’t insanely broken any time soon, and so you could hold it against the overall polity that we are dangerously bad at selecting leaders… and unlikely to fix this fast enough to matter… but in terms of the basic decency of our median voter I think that Trump isn’t strong evidence that we are morally degenerate sociopaths.
In fact, Americans tend to smile a lot, and donate to charity, and are generally quite reasonable, and don’t want an empire, and quite like the idea of being a fair, tolerant, prosperous, just, non-racist shining city on a hill.
Americans created Wikipedia, give it away for free, and it runs on donations. If that impulse runs from the people directly into the AGI, then that’s better rather than worse. (Assuming alignment is even real. If it isn’t possible/easy/whatever then it doesn’t matter which country builds “the alien monster that will inevitably kill us all without remorse given that it is very powerful and doesn’t love us and doesn’t even understand the concept of love”.)
The CCP blocks access to Wikipedia by default: you have to use a VPN, which is illegal, but also >30% of the population uses these illegal VPNs, and also some VPNs are tolerated if they install backdoors for the CCP to spy on them. Fuck that noise.
(2) The broad material intellectual history of Rights Respecting Democractic Republicanism is real, and being shat upon by Trump, but it still exists to drop into an LLM and give positive reinforcement for feeling good about that stuff and endorsing it.
America and Americans have often failed to live up to the ideals, but we also articulated those ideals, and also articulated the idea of “approximating them more and more successfully in real life over the course of history”.
The White House was built by slaves, and then eventually slavery was outlawed, and black cultural integration proceeded decade by decade, in fits and starts, and eventually a descendant to slaves (though (to be clear) Michelle and Barry also had ancestors who owned slaves) moved in as the President and the First Lady. And everyone who was willing to talk about it in public was proud of this. Because the formal written ideals of our country are about god-given inalienable rights, including the right of everyone to own property and pursue happiness. The government can take your shit… but they have to do it via eminent domain and pay you fair value for it. (I grant that, if Obama is part of the evidence about America then so is Trump. Both, in my opinion, are in some deep senses “accidents of a terribly designed voting system” but I think Obama was a happy accident, and people clapped and wrote happy things about progress and fairness and justice afterwards. That writing is part of what goes into an American LLM, by default.)
By contrast, the CCP runs Uyghur Gulags right now and basically doesn’t even apologize. They want to conquer Tibet, and Taiwan, and are proud of it. They violated the treaty with the UK, whereby the UK gave up Hong Kong fair and square (according to the letter of a treaty signed long ago) after the CCP promised to grant them rights to vote for their own city government in the way they were used to under UK guidance…
...and then there were brutal crackdowns and something like 10k people were thrown in secret prisons for trying to insist on those rights. At least Hitler was elected. The CCP weren’t even elected. They seized power irregularly, through violence, authorized by the slogan political power comes our of the barrel of a gun. They still formally oppose the concept of elections. The entire idea of “consent ethics” is foreign to the logic of their system.
Intelligence is only a positive sign when the agent that is intelligent cares about you.
If you are certain that they would murder you and take your shit if they could get away with that somehow, then intelligence is a worrying sign, because it gives them a better chance to realize their preference of murdering you and taking your shit.
Personally, I’m in favor of establishing a world government, with a proportionally representative parliament that elects a Condorcet prime minister.
From my perspective, unboxed ASI might very well be like first contact with aliens (from platospace rather than outerspace), and the outerspace aliens generally say “take me to your leaders” when they meet humans in stories, and… currently Earth has no such people to take them to! It’d be nice to fix this error in my opinion.
But the CCP will never endorse this, whereas quite a few Americans will notice that this is consistent with our founding ideals, that many of us still cherish, and be on board with offering such influence to the people of Earth in a fair and reasonable way.
I’m confused why electoral systems seems to be at the forefront of your thinking about the relevant pros and cons of US or Chinese domination of the future. Electoral systems do and can matter, but consider that all of the good stuff that happened in Anglo-America happened under first past the post as well, and all the bad stuff that happened elsewhere happened under whatever system they used (the Nazis came to power under proportional representation!).
Consider instead that Trump was elected with over 50% of the popular vote. Perhaps there are more fundamental cultural factors at play than the method used to count ballots.
Winning the popular vote in the current system doesn’t tell you what would happen in a different system. This is the same mistake people make when they talk about who would have won if we didn’t have an electoral college: If we had a different system, candidates would campaign differently and voters would vote differently.
But that’s wrong. Trump received 49.8% of the votes.
Yes, my mistake. I meant Trump votes > Harris votes and forgot about 3rd parties. On the other hand 49.8% vs 50% + 1 feels semi trivial when compared to say the UK where Labour received 33.7% of the vote.
I always find the use of “X% of the vote” in US elections to make some general point about overall acceptability or representation of the general public problematic. I agree it’s a true statement but leaves out the important aspect of turn out for the vote.
I have to wonder if, particularly the USA, would not be quite as divided if all the reporting provided percentage of vote of the eligible voting population rather than the percentage of votes cast. I think there is a big problem with just ignoring the non-vote information the is present (or expecting anyone to look it up and make the adjustments on their own).
But I agree, I’m not too sure just where electoral systems fall into this question of AGI/ASI first emerging under ether the USA or CCP.
I can imagine an argument analogous to Eliezer’s old graphic illustrating that it’s a mistake to think of a superintelligence as Einstein in a box. I’m referring to the graphic where you have a line running from left to right, on the left you have chimp, ordinary person, Einstein all clustered together, and then far away on the other side, “superintelligence”, the point being that superintelligence far transcends all three.
In the same way, the nature of the world when you have a power that great is so different that the differences among all human political systems diminish to almost nothing by comparison, they are just trivial reorderings of power relations among beings so puny as to be almost powerless. Neither the Chinese nor the American system is built to include intelligent agents with the power of a god, that’s “out of distribution” for both the Communist Manifesto and the Federalist Papers.
Because of that, I find it genuinely difficult to infer from the nature of the political system, what the likely character of a superintelligence interested in humanity could be. I feel like contingencies of culture and individual psychology could end up being more important. So long as you have elements of humaneness and philosophical reflection in a culture, maybe you have a chance of human-friendly superintelligence emerging.
I notice you’re talking a lot about the values of American people but only talk about what the leaders of China are doing or would do.
If you just compare both leaders likelihood of enacting a world government, once again there is no clear winner.
I’m interpreting this as “intelligence is irrelevant if the CCP doesn’t care about you.” Once again you need to show that Trump cares more about us (citizens of the world) than the CCP. As a non-American it is not clear to me that he does.
I think the best argument for America over China would be the idea that Trump will be replaced in under 4 years with someone much more ethical.
Hello anonymous account that joined 2 months ago and might be a bot! I will respond to you extensively and in good faith! <3
Yes, I agree with your summary of my focus… Indeed, I think “focusing on the people and their culture” is consistent with a liberal society, freedom of conscience, etc, which are part of the American cultural package that restrains Trump, whose even-most-loyal minions have a “liberal judeo-christian constitutional cultural package” installed in their emotional settings based on generations of familial cultures living in a free society with rule of law.
By contrast, “focusing on the leadership” is in fact consistent when reasoning about China, which has only ever had “something like a Liberal Rights-Respecting Democratic Republic” for a brief period from 1912 to 1949 and is currently being oppressed by an unelected totalitarian regime.
I’m not saying that Chinese people are spiritually or genetically incapable of caring about fairness and predictable leadership and freedom and wanting to engage in responsible self-rule and so on (Taiwan, for example has many ethnically Chinese people, who speak a Chinese dialect, and had ancestors from China, and who hold elections, and have rule of law, and, indeed, from a distance, seems better run that America).
But for the last ~76 years, mainland China has raised human people whose cultural and institutional and moral vibe has been “power does as power wills and I should submit to that power”.
And for the thousands of years before 1912 it was one Emperor after another, with brief periods of violence, where winning the violent struggle explicitly conferred legitimacy. There was no debate. There was no justice. There was only murdering one’s political enemies better and faster than one could be murdered in pre-emptive response, and then long periods of feudal authoritarian rule by the best murderer’s gang of murderers being submitted to by cowardly peasants. That’s what the feudal system was everywhere there was feudalism. Rule by murderer… normalized into a cultural field that tolerates enormous hierarchical disparities in formal power.
In the meantime, tactically and practically, I believe that Chinese companies don’t functionally exist unless they have political officers who are embedded in their management that report via a chain of command up to Xi.
I think these political officers are listened to very closely because if the nominal owners do NOT listen to the top-down advice of their political officers, the officer can call in secret police to kidnap and torture the nominal owners of the company (and this practice is considered “legitimate” rather than a sign that Xi should be impeached and convicted of one of the various crimes he has surely committed since almost everyone has committed some crimes under some plausible framing...
...(if the impeachment and conviction was going to be “technically lawful” (impeachment and conviction being a matter of politics in practice, according to the highest laws of the US, since it is decided by a vote of the Senate (but those same laws require the forms to be observed in the language of justice and a trial)))).
By contrast, I don’t believe that (1) the Trump regime is capable of installing any such meta-hierarchy of political officers in most US companies and (2) the US military under his command (who admittedly will mostly take his orders) will not be at the forefront of AGI R&D.
So in the US I expect the culture of researchers, and engineers, and their managers in free private industry to dominate much of what occurs (and they will roll their eyes about Trump, and wish he was less of a demented old man, and wish that his handlers told him “no” more often so his destruction of America would slow down), whereas in China I expect Xi can and will veto anything Xi wants to veto, and fund what he wants to fund, and the culture will tend to presubmit to his imagined tyrannical will automatically.
Also… speaking here to the wider audience of “people not in either country”… they might notice that China is almost entirely composed of Han Chinese. The one other significant ethnicity is currently in gulags. If the CCP is not ideologically racist, that would be a hopeful and surprising update to me, but it seems like they just straightforwardly are.
And if the CCP was going to put “kin altruism for their kin and only their kin (as part of their ‘extrapolated national volition’?)” unto a powerful AGI or weak ASI a plausibly “calculatingly correct” step in the application of that utility function to a long term shape for Earth… is just killing everyone on the planet who isn’t Han?
By contrast, if you, Dear Reader, live in Nigeria, or Chile, or Vietnam, or Samoa, or Sicily, or Sri Lanka, or Iran, or Madagascar, or Serbia, or Ireland, or Lebanon, or Nepal, or Japan, or almost anywhere on Earth, there are “people with similar heritage to you” in America, who have mostly positive ethnic feelings about people “back in the old country” (that they feel mildly guilty about being too proud of in public with too much enthusiasm, because they don’t want to seem racist).
Sundar and Satya are the CEOs of Google and Microsoft and both were born in India. The “other kind of Indians” (granting that they were subject to de facto genocide between 1500 and 1890 (and that was very sad)) have “respect for their treaties” re-affirmed by more-or-less the current SCOTUS.
Like: from what I can tell, America is uniquely meta-racial and across-centuries-aspirationally-lawful in its cultural morality?
I understand why many random normies who speak English might prefer China to win an AI race (if a race isn’t just a race to building a thing that loves nothing, and calculates everything, and will murder all humans once it can safely do so)...
...a huge reason many normies have positive vibes towards the CCP is that their brain is being programmed by TikTok to have vague confused positive emotions in that direction.
I think TikTok’s operations for the souls of America are bad and sad. They make them anti-Semitic (for now), pro-Trump (for now), and pro-CCP (in general).
In my opinion, TikTok should be forced to sell to US owners, and all of its upper management should live outside of the possibility of being put in a gulag by Xi’s minions.
They and their extended families who could be used as hostages should be offered citizenship and move to Hawaii or Seattle or whatever. Or let go. Or something that separates “algorithmic influence over US youth culture” from “the CCP’s plans” with a good clean boundary. If that doesn’t happen, then TikTok should just be shut down.
TikTok should be purchased or shut down BEFORE the 2026 elections.
Also BEFORE the 2028 elections.
It probably won’t be, because the US government is full of corrupt idiots. But it should be.
In my opinion, the Bill of Rights works for free humans as an overall package.
We can assemble as we like. We can contract as we like. We can speak as we like. We can hire (or not hire) Republicans or Democrats or whoever, as we like. We can form new partisan groups if we like (since neither the Whigs nor the Federalists are still around, and the Democrats and Republicans morph into totally new ways to slice up the political ideology space every ~25 years (trading sides on which one is rightwing and which is leftwing while redefining what left/right even mean as they go)).
((The Republican are lately the party of chaotic uneducated poor people lately, and so I think they are the leftists… maybe? Its hard to say. The re-arrangement is in progress still.))
The freedoms that American’s enjoy extend all the way into the package of freedoms needed to organize into militias and throw off the yoke of an oppressive government.
This gives people in the US enormous powers of mutual self regulation via sublawful mechanisms, which is great according to the philosophy of civic communitarianism (which is a great philosophy).
If I say something truly horrific, people might shun me.
I won’t be put in jail for saying it… but I might be invited to fewer birthday parties and picnics. Which is important… if I leave near them. But I don’t live near anyone who runs TikTok.
Suppose you have a free and sane and healthy people with freedoms that are pro-actively secured and expanded by a liberal democratic rights-respecting conscience-respecting consent-based institution with large governance reach.
If the reach of this institution isn’t total, then “outside factors” that are inimical to freedom and liberalism-broadly-construed should not be granted the specific and narrow right of “the parts of the freedom package called ‘free speech’ that could help an algorithmically empowered tyrant have the ability to destroy the community’s internal sense making and civic philosophic ideals and mutual care for each other without the operators of that ‘algorithmic civic destruction program’ having to face the consequences of having done that in a way that also exposes the attacker to the economic and social sanctions of the free people whose culture they are destroying from the outside”.
So I think TikTok doesn’t deserve free speech rights.
(Relatedly, I think that Citizens was decided wrongly by the SCOTUS in 2010. I don’t even think US corporations deserve “free speech rights”. Just humans in the US with an amygdala and fear and hopes and dreams and family and so on. This is one of many many things that I think US jurisprudence systems have gotten wrong over the last 200 years.)
To expand and illustrate how the package of freedoms connects back to tech companies...
Larry and Sergey can make YouTube destroy the civic cohesion of America if they want (because most people can’t resist trolling and trolling can destroy a community and trolls can be amplified any time YouTube chooses to amplify such stuff) but they grew up here, and so on. They just don’t wanna do that.
Also, they won’t be murdered by Trump if they say no to him proposing certain algorithmic tweaks that have a deep and sociologically coherent relation to abstract preferences for destroying America as a democratic polity full of health sane free people who believe in classical liberal respect for conscience and so on.
I basically trust Larry and Sergey, and think their conscience can protect America even despite America’s own elected POTUS appearing to be trying to destroy America as fast as possible.
By contrast, with TikTok, Liang Rubo (founder, president of the board, and CEO) and/or Zhang Fuping (chief editor and a party secretary??) have wildly different incentives and institutional linkages. Also, they don’t have Wikipedia pages. Also, they have incentives to hide that they are truly in power if they are truly in power. Maybe Shou Zi Chew is the real power (but even then, he is not a US citizen and neither are many of his employees)? Maybe the real CCP political officer has been swapped with a new one without any announcements that is easily discernible from casual OSINT data? Ultimately, it all goes up to Xi, right?
Allowing TikTok to algorithmically reprogram the emotions and media expectations and world model of America’s youth is insane. It is part of how we got Trump in the first place.
And the CCP’s way of doing politico-economic business is legibly UNfriendly to people who love freedom, appreciate transparency, respect consent ethics, smile and clap when clean elections occur, dislike racist gulags, and so on.
Feel free to correct me on the freedom loving nature of Chinese people, if you think they hate freedom. (I just think they haven’t tasted it except for very very briefly in the early 1900s, and so their language models will not have love of freedom baked into the latent semantic vector spaces.)
I sorta presume that the people of China do in fact yearn to hold open free and fair elections to select a wise and popular leader, like those that occur in Taiwan, and which occurred for their ancestors between 1912 and 1949.
I think the people of China are oppressed, and I wish them prosperity and freedom and happy futures. Maybe a benevolent ASI will be able to find some weird set of deals and adjustments to get that for them without too much tragedy… if they want it?
But ultimately I have no way of knowing, since right now the people of China are oppressed by the CCP, and would be put in jail for saying what kind of governance they actually positively would prefer, and there are no trivially trustable polls (though it isn’t absolute), and I suspect that anyone who tried to run a real poll independently of CCP oversight would probably be put in jail?
If you have insight into the “real political culture” of actual human individuals in China (who I think will currently be thrown in jail if they protest in favor of being allowed to protest (like the Hong Kong protesters were)) then I’m open to being educated :-)
Your comment has made me think rather hard on the nature of China and America. The two countries definitely have different political philosophies. On the question of how to avoid dictatorship, you could say that the American system relies on representation of the individual via the vote, whereas the Chinese system relies on representation of the masses via the party. If an American leader becomes an unpopular dictator, American individuals will vote them out; if a Chinese leader becomes an unpopular dictator, the Chinese masses will force the party back on track.
Even before these modern political philosophies, the old world recognized that popular discontent could be justified. That’s the other side of the mandate of heaven: when a ruler is oppressive, the mandate is withdrawn, and revolt is justified. Power in the world of monarchs and emperors was not just about who’s the better killer; there was a moral dimension, just as democratic elections are not just a matter of who has the most donors and the best public relations.
Returning to the present and going into more detail, America is, let’s say, a constitutional democratic republic in which a party system emerged. There’s a tension between the democratic aspect (will of the people) and the republican aspect (rights of the individual), which crystallized into an opposition found in the very names of the two main parties; though in the Obama-Trump era, the ideologies of the two parties evolved to transnational progressivism and populist nationalism.
These two ideologies had a different attitude to the unipolar world-system that America acquired, first by inheriting the oceans from the British empire, and then by outlasting the Russian communist alternative to liberal democracy, in the ideological Cold War. For about two decades, the world system was one of negotiated capitalist trade among sovereign nations, with America as the “world police” and also a promoter of universal democracy. In the 2010s, this broke down as progressivism took over American institutions, including its external relations, and world regions outside the West increasingly asserted their independence of American values. The appearance of populist nationalism inside America makes sense as a reaction to this situation, and in the 2020s we’re seeing how that ideology acts within the world system: America is conceived as the strongest great power, acting primarily in the national interest, with a nature and a heritage that it will not try to universalize.
So that’s our world now. Europe and its offshoots conquered the world, but imperialism was replaced by nationalism, and we got the United Nations world of several great powers and several hundred nations. America is the strongest, but the other great powers are now following their own values, and the strongest among the others is China. America is a young offspring of Europe on a separate continent, modern China is the latest iteration of civilization on its ancient territory. The American political philosophy is an evolution of some ancient European ideas; the Chinese political philosophy is an indigenous adaptation of an anti-systemic philosophy from modern Europe.
One thing about Chinese Marxism that is different from the old Russian Marxism, is that it is more “voluntarist”. Mao regarded Russian Marxism as too mechanical in its understanding of history; according to Mao, the will of the people and the choices of their political leadership can make a difference to events. I see an echo of this in the way that every new secretary of the Chinese Communist Party has to bring some new contribution to Marxist thought, most recently “Xi Jinping Thought”. The party leader also has to be the foremost “thought leader” in Chinese Marxism, or they must at least lend their name to the ideological state of the art (Wang Huning is widely regarded as the main Chinese ideologist of the present). This helps me to understand the relationship between the party and the state institutions. The institutions manage society and have concrete responsibilities, while the party determines and enforces the politically correct philosophy (analogous to the role that some now assign to the Ivy League universities in America).
I’ve written all this to explain in greater detail, the thinking which I believe actually governs China. To just call China an oppressive dictatorship, is to miss the actual logic of its politics. There are certainly challenges to its ideology. For example, the communist ideology was originally meant to ensure that the country was governed in the interest of the worker and peasant classes. But with the tolerance of private enterprise, more and more people become the kind of calculating individual agent you have under capitalism, and arguably representative democracy is more suited to such a society.
One political scientist argues that ardor for revolutionary values died with Mao, leaving a void which is filled partly by traditional values and partly by liberal values. Perhaps it’s analogous to how America’s current parties and their ideologies are competing for control of a system that (at least since FDR) was built around liberal values; except that in China, instead of separate parties, you have factions within the CCP. In any case, China hasn’t tilted to Falun Gong traditionalism or State Department democratization, instead Xi Jinping Thought has reasserted the centrality of the party to Chinese stability and progress.
Again, I’m writing this so we can have a slightly more concrete discussion of China. There’s also a bunch of minor details in your account that I believe are wrong. For example, “Nationalist China” (the political order on the Chinese mainland, between the last dynasty and the communist victory) did not have regular elections as far as I know. They got a parliament together at the very beginning, and then that parliament remained unchanged until they retreated to Taiwan (they were busy with famines, warlordism, and the Japanese invasion); and then Taiwan remained a miitary-run regime for forty years. The Uighurs are far from being the only significant ethnic group apart from the Han, there are several others of the same size. Zhang Yiming and Rubo Liang are executives from Bytedance, the parent company of Tiktok (consider the relationship between Google/Alphabet and YouTube); I think Zhang is the richest man in China, incidentally.
I could also do more to explain Chinese actions that westerners find objectionable, or dig up the “necessary evils” that the West itself carries out. But then we’d be here all day. I think I do agree that American society is politically friendlier to the individual than Chinese society; and also that American culture, in its vast complexity, contains many many valuable things (among which I would count, not just notions like rule of law, human rights, and various forms of respect for human subjectivity, but also the very existence of futurist and transhumanist subcultures; they may not be part of the mainstream, but it’s significant that they get to exist at all).
But I wanted to emphasize that China is not just some arbitrary tyranny. It has its freedoms, it has its own checks and balances, it has its own geopolitical coalitions (e.g. BRICS) united by a desire to flourish without American dependence or intervention. It’s not a hermit kingdom that tunes out the world (witness, for example, the frequency with which very western-sounding attitudes emerge from their AIs, because of the training data that they have used). If superintelligence does first emerge within China’s political and cultural matrix, it has a chance of being human-friendly; it will just have arrived at that attractor from a different starting point, compared to the West.
Thanks for the reply, you’ll be happy to know I’m not a bot. I actually mostly agree with everything you wrote so apologies if I don’t reply as extensively as you have.
There’s no doubt the CCP are oppressing the Chinese people. Ive never used TikTok and never intend to (and I think it’s being used as a propaganda machine). I agree that Americans have far more freedom of speech and company freedom than in China. I even think it’s quite clear that Americans will be better off with Americans winning the AI race.
The reason I am cautious boils down to believing that as AI capabilities get close to ASI or powerful AI, governments (both US and Chinese) will step in and basically take control of the projects. Imagine if the nuclear bomb was first developed by a private company, they are going to get no say in how it is used. This would be harder in the US than in China but it would seem naive to assume it can’t be done.
If this powerful AI is able to be steered by these governments, when imagining Trump’s decisions VS Xi’s in this situation it seems quite negative either way and I’m having trouble seeing a positive outcome for the non-American, non-Chinese people.
On balance, America has the edge, but it’s not a hopeful situation if powerful AI appears in the next 4 years. Like I said, I’m mostly concerned about the current leadership, not the American people’s values.