Speaker unverified: commitment

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…I think this is a category distinction of what we're trying to do. The last thousand years of technology has been technologies that have been extremely adaptive for humans, that have helped humans do new things. And they haven't encroached upon our core fundamental advantage, which is our ability to think and then do things in the real world. Obviously, during the Industrial Revolution, there were lots of concerns that replacing and automating large parts of physical labor would result in a world in which people didn't matter. But I think the actual outcome was a bit different because, of course, There isn't a machine that was produced in the Industrial Revolution that completely automated human thinking and our ability that's kept us at the top of the food chain. And if you look at the goal of a whole lot of companies in the field, you'll find that they stake their claim, their reason for existence is to create technologies that can do everything that any human can do better, faster, and cheaper. And of course, the question then is, if it is the case, that this allows capital to convert directly into results without removing the need for other people in the middle, why wouldn't companies just invest more and more money into this? I don't think it's Machiavellian. I don't think it's an evil plot by them. What I think instead is that if you have the opportunity to save 50% on your wage bill while also getting better, faster, more reliable results, most people are going to take that option. And so my concern here is that as we continue to build technology that is designed to replace rather than to augment, that we moved closer and closer towards a world where people just don't matter. And then, of course, you're reliant on other forces, you're reliant on government to make sure that you still have a high quality of life when you can't produce it for yourself. I think it's a very precarious situation to be in. If we think about pensioners today, for example, they don't produce much for society. In fact, they are, in a sense, a draw on society's resources, but they're still protected. Why couldn't we imagine an expansion of that system? This is kind of the obvious solution that comes to mind for people. We will have universal basic income, and we will have protection of individual rights. And so we will maintain agency and relevance in an age of advanced AI. So I end up arguing something like, the core proposition is that your economic value is an important part of your political value. We've seen in the history of democracies that oftentimes they start at the moment where there are diffuse actors who have varying amounts of capital who need to find ways to settle disputes about violence. The emergence, for example, of British democracy. And the Magna Carta came because there were lords that had power that wasn't equivalent to a king necessarily, but sure had a lot of influence. And that came from the material possessions that they controlled. This necessitated free courts and some sort of a way to solve disputes in Parliament. And the evolution kept moving backwards and backwards and backwards. And we continue to see that this economic liberalization is oftentimes a precondition for the democracies we really care about. Now, there are non-democracies that are fine places to live. that don't wildly trample on human rights. But of course, we know that there's an extremely strong correlation between governments that respect your rights and enable you to be prosperous and governments that are democratic. These things aren't one-to-one, but they're pretty damn close. And so the concern that I have here is that as we level the underlying economic structure that creates these bargaining chips that put us in power, that we end up reducing those. Pensioners are a fantastic example here because of course, a pensioner isn't someone who appears and never works for the rest of their life. Pensioners have 40 years of working extremely hard, paying into a system, and then being active members of society who then have a bargaining chip so that in the last 20 or 30, 10, 20, 30 years of their life, they get this exemption. It's because of the system that we have built that this is stable. And I would also add that, of course, in the history of the United States, for example, we treat our retired folks way better today than we did before things like the New Deal, which involved mass amounts of unrest, and workers trying to use their bargaining chip. So I'm very concerned about the world of which we all are pensioners forever with no way to actually bargain at the mercy of the next election for what happens in our subsequent years.…

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