Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I’ve known people who’ve gotten fired through it, I guess I would say. Something seems to be happening around that. I’m not sure they’ve done it at the mass level, but they do appear to have done it to some degree in some places. I am seeing a lot of extremely indiscriminate work. People who, for instance, it took a long time to recruit into the federal government because it was hard, and they had to get exemptions in order to give them higher pay. That’s a thing that happens a lot, and it’s a long time of bureaucratic fighting. On the one hand, that it took so long to get them in is a problem I want to solve. On the other hand, indiscriminately now knocking them out is not something I would like to see. I think the question of how to ready the government for AI is a real one. I would like to see a little bit of what this AI looks like before I start doing mass firings to support it. I would like to decide, actually describe aims for this AI. You said this a couple of times: What should the aims of the AI be? You’re not a person who just thinks the category of AI is undifferentiated. You need to tell it what you want it to do, or at least tell it what you want it to figure out to do. What is it doing here? Oh, sure, but I’m struck by how small many companies can become. Midjourney, which you’re familiar with, at the peak of its innovation was eight people. That was not mainly a story about consultants. Sam Altman says it will be possible to have billion-dollar companies run by one person. I suspect that’s two or three people, but nonetheless, that seems not so far off. It seems to me, there really ought to be significant parts of the government — by no means all — where you could have a much smaller number of people directing the AIs. It would be the same people at the top giving the orders as today, more or less, and just a lot fewer staff. I don’t see how that can’t be the case. I agree with you that, in theory, should be the case, but I do think that, as you actually see it emerge from “in theory should be the case” till we figure out a way to do it, it’s going to turn out that things the federal government does are not all that like [putting] an image prompt into a thing.…

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