This trend is actually kind of good for AI safety...? Because it means you just have to control and regulate N frontier labs, with N=4 or so, not billions of individuals who are potentially crazy.
Create a global AI non-proliferation treaty, make sure the strongest models are only available to the big labs, and make sure the big labs follow some highly cautious and bureaucratic process when rolling out a new model. It won’t be easy to implement, but it’s not inconceivable.
There’s a tension inherent in any critique of the American system: yes, on the one hand, we have tons of absurd bureaucracy and corporate bloat that prevents people from living up to their potential. On the other hand, we are witnessing one of the most spectacular technological breakthroughs in history, which is almost completely due to the high-IQ American tech ecosystem. So our talent wastage can’t be that bad.
I think the synthesis is that we simply have far more talent than we can effectively use. In a country of 300 million people, which can draw the best talent from around the world, IQ is simply not a scarce commodity, so squandering it on bureaucratic nonsense just isn’t a big deal in a macro sense.
Athens actually had a key military technology as well: the trireme. This was the most maneuverable warship of its time, and allowed Athens to create a naval empire (or thalassocracy). But the effectiveness of the trireme depended on having a crew of skilled rowers, who were generally middle or lower class men. So plausibly Athenian democracy was due to the importance of recruiting and engaging citizens from the lower classes to man their triremes.
It isn’t a sign of decline of public life or anything; people are just bad at explaining their feelings
There is a strong analogy to grammar here. Native speakers can very confidently determine whether a particular utterance is grammatical without being able to explain their reasoning in technical terms. Strong justified confidence in a conclusion does not require the ability to explain the underlying reasoning.
(as an example, try asking a native speaker to explain how to form English questions grammatically, including subject/aux inversion and do-insertion)
(repost from FB comment):
There’s a lot to say in response to this, but what’s most striking to me is the gap between your interpretation of the history and mine. Your interpretation seems to be something about moral or intellectual corruption. My is a simple practical diagnosis and prescription: the Athenians should have abandoned their own empire, because it corrupted their public thinking—and did so with extreme rapidity, in the course of a few generations. I of course feel the same way about the US.
I feel that you are overfitting: asserting a more complex model than can be justified on the basis of a small number of noisy data points. Some countries developed rapidly under IMF/World Bank guidance. Some Western countries (Australia, Canada) converted a large share of their economies into extracting resources for China, and seem to be okay in spite of this. Some developing countries (Saudi, UAE) managed to grow very wealthy on the basis of resource extraction. If African problems are downstream of European colonialism, why are Indonesia and Malaysia (both extensively colonized) now squarely middle income?
It is confusing that you are using Claude to analyze its own outputs and those of its peers. I would have preferred a close textual analysis, quoting passages from Claude and offering your comments about what is going on intellectually or computationally. What exactly is the “filler, hedging, and soft-pedaling” that you accuse the LLMs of producing?
I view political polarization as a religious schism analogous to the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Europe or Sunni and Shia in the Muslim world. As such, I don’t see a need to explain Woke vs Maga: it is just an example of a natural sociological phenomenon in human societies (perhaps there is a need to explain why religious schism happens in general).
Don’t overlook “You’re single because of Culture War-driven gender alienation”. There is a yawning political chasm between young men and women these days, and politics is increasingly a dealbreaker for many people.
It’s really hard and maybe requires a lot of internal strength / grace / ego management, as well as deep cognitive flexibility.
Do you find it similarly hard to empathize with people who support the following regimes:
- Chinese Communist Party
- Iranian theocracy (now perhaps endangered)
- Russia / Putin (at least historically, Putin had very high approval ratings)
- Pre-2025 Maduro / Chavez government of Venezuela
- Islamic fundamentalist / monarchist government of Saudi Arabia
Similarly, is it hard to empathize with citizens of friendly countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, who are incomparably more xenophobic than the average Republican?
“No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance. I daresay I was not very well at that time. I tottered about the streets—there were various affairs to settle—grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable persons. I admit my behaviour was inexcusable ….
Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”
I think that the vast majority of people, including you, are catastrophically underestimating the seriousness of the culture war and overestimating the significance of Trump. There is a common historical pattern that could be called Short War Bias, where people mistakenly believe that a conflict can and will be won with a few decisive victories. Winning in 2028 will simply mean that you face an even more energized and radicalized conservative / MAGA base in 2032.
I see a close analogy between the culture war and the wars of religion in old Europe. Those wars lasted for centuries and involved millions of casualties (as many as the 20th century wars when normalizing for population size).
If you really want to improve the world, I would recommend a two-pronged strategy:
- Use the Pareto principle to limit the damage done by Trump in the next couple of years. Focus only on the 20% of battles that cause 80% of the damage, let him win the rest
- Try to create a political framework where the two tribes (Woke left and MAGA right) can live together without murdering each other
The overwhelming priority for EAs should be to serve as peace emissaries and advocates in the culture war.
War is an ethical inversion: acts that are plainly evil in peacetime become heroic and praiseworthy in times of war. War destroys value at a double rate: the warrior’s honor is to accept pain, suffering, and the risk of death in order to inflict those ills on his enemies. Further, in wartime the opposing parties cannot pause their hostilities to make side deals, even if those deals would be mutually beneficial (the Russians and Ukrainians are not going to pause the fighting to ink a trade deal or build a gas pipeline, even if those plans were beneficial to both sides).
If an EA could go back in time to the era of the European wars of religion, it is obvious that the ethically correct strategy would be to attempt to promote peace and understanding between Protestants and Catholics (it would be comically evil and irrational to pick a side and wage war against the other). Our current culture war of Woke vs MAGA is just another instance of this type of conflict and we must draw the same ethical conclusion.
Good article. I would advise less emphasis on traditional schooling (reading, writing, ’rithmetic) and more emphasis on relationship intelligence and embodied intelligence (making things with your hands).
To me the most important graph is the one that shows both mothers and fathers started spending much more time on child-care in the 90s. What the heck happened? Did children suddenly become that much more difficult to manage? If kids really consume that much time and effort, it’s no wonder that people don’t want to have kids—it’s too much damn work!
The Japanese value stability much, much more than Americans. This harms their economy in various ways:
Firms that are losing money are kept alive
Employees that underperform are not fired
Seniority is prized much more than talent (if someone is promoted higher due to talent, other employees will be unhappy)
Customers continue to patronize their known vendors due to loyalty, even if those vendors aren’t very good
The idea of “disruption”—the holy grail of Silicon Valley—is anathema to Japanese.
How much did the supposedly severe decline in Google’s organizational health contribute to your decision to change jobs?
Defined benefit pension schemes like Social Security are grotesquely racist and sexist, because of life expectancy differences between demographic groups.
African American males have a life expectancy of about 73 years, while Asian American females can expect to live 89 years. The percentage difference between those numbers may not seem that large, but it means that the latter group gets 24 years of pension payouts (assuming a retirement age of 65), while the former gets only 8, a 3x difference. So if you look at a black man and an Asian woman who have the exact same career trajectory, SS pay-ins, and retirement date, the latter will receive a 3x greater benefit than the former.
Another way of seeing this fact is to imagine what would happen if SSA kept separate accounting buckets for each group. Since the life expectancy for black men is much lower, they will receive a significant benefit (either lower payments or higher payouts) from the creation of this barrier.
Defined-benefit schemes add insult to injury. The injury is that some groups have shorter lives. The insult is that the government forces them to subsidize the retirement of longer-lived groups.
In general, anytime you see a hardcoded age-of-retirement number in the tax system or entitlement system, the underlying ethics is questionable. Medicare kicks in at 65, which means that some groups get a much greater duration of government-supported healthcare.
Judging by the hammering that Meta’s stock has taken over the last 5 years, the market really disagrees with you.
Here’s an argument against radical VR transformation in the near term: some significant proportion of people have a strong anti-VR aversion. But the benefit of VR for meetings has strong network effects: if you have 6 friends you want to meet with, but 2 out of the 6 hates VR, that’s going to derail the benefit of VR for the whole group.
Rephrasing of your motto: don’t build a huge empire, because eventually that empire will grow corrupt. It’s better to have an Archipelago of City-states, because when an individual city decays, it’s not a global catastrophe.
But Eliezer seems to think that we need a global regulatory agency for AI. It’s a plausible enough idea, but what happens when the agency falls into corruption like all the other crappy 3-letter agencies run by the US and the UN?