Luke Drago: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think we'll be able to shape the future economy using our culture, using our values? Or do you think that what matters most in the end is the underlying features of AI as a technology and the economic incentives that it causes? Yeah, incentives are a powerful thing, but they are not predetermined. One, they're not predetermined and two, they're not ironclad. We have So many examples in history of great people defying incentives. I mean, I can just rattle them off. Washington deciding to step down, becoming the great Cincinnatus and not making himself king is one obvious example here, where a leader looked at the incentives, looked at the ability for them to gain power and said no. And oftentimes, I think one of the ways to reconcile like structural views of history and great man views of history is that these structural forces set up the incentives. but individuals can then defy or alter those incentives and make different choices. Incentives aren't law, but they are really powerful. And you want to align your incentives so that you're not hoping that every time a bad thing could happen, you are totally reliant on the character of the person in power such that they ignore every incentive in front of them. We talk about this in the paper. We said that economic forces are a predominant force here and a very powerful force, and that societies are extremely exposed to these incentives. But there are other things that shape their values as well. Cultural forces are very powerful, and oftentimes countries make decisions in favor of their culture, or societies do, that are culturally good for them, even if they're economically bad. The existing powers dynamics that we have also enable this. One example here is like Brexit is an obvious example of a country's population choosing a thing that is probably against their economic interests for a different value set. And I'm not commenting on the merits of that debate. I'm simply saying that there isn't strong economic argument on one side and an argument on sovereignty on the other. And that sovereignty argument won the public, even if it failed to persuade their elites. I'm not saying that every outcome should be like Brexit, but I'm saying that this is the kind of thing where you actually can make different trade-offs here. But of course, you know, there's that very famous quote. about, I think it's Charlie Munger that says, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. And I think if you have the opportunity to move those incentives in a positive direction for humanity, you really should. One way to do this is to think about which technologies we want to develop first and which technologies we want our most talented people to work on. We can talk about differential technological development. So if you look at the landscape as it is now, which technologies are currently undervalued? Where should we be pushing such that we can kind of change the incentives that the technologies create?…

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