Arthur Kroeber: belief

Transcript context

…There's another problem with this focus on specific parts of technology development. In any field you understand well enough, you realize how contingent and random the steps leading up to what we now consider to be this self-contained high tech thing were. The field I know better than others is AI. There's just so many weird things. People wanted to play video games and so we had decades of progress in making these graphics processing units which contributed to AI development. People were just posting on Reddit, on Twitter and so forth. That fossil fuel of data has been powering these AI models. The idea that you could have just said in 2000, “We want to make progress towards AGI” and somehow that would have led somewhere as opposed to what actually ended up happening… You can scale that analogy up to China, just its total economy. In terms of how they got here, the thing you want to be careful about is that this was not the result of some carefully crafted master plan that they knew all along. It was a lot of groping and a lot of random stuff. They did one thing for one reason and another thing for another reason. Then through this random process, it all coalesced in the end. The amount of intelligent design behind that was I think actually quite low. They got a few big directional things correct. They stuck with them. That's where I would give policy credit. They were also willing to adapt when things were obviously not working and cut things off and adjust with pretty high frequency. But a lot of it was essentially a random walk where a lot of things that were enabled then started to interact with each other in the way that you talked about with AI. Then they create these other results which could not have been preplanned. Another thing to consider when discussing the virtue of such a system is that you can't just look at the results over the course of 20-30 years and say, “Since they were able to pick the key technologies over this period, therefore this system is preferable.” It's somewhat similar to looking at one successful dictator and saying, “Because they made the right calls, dictatorship is the right model.” I actually don't know that much about what Japan was doing from the 40s to the 70s. But I assume MITI, or whatever, made some right calls about which electronics and cars are important. But in order to judge, how plausible is it that this level of competence and foresight and luck or whatever mixture they're in will continue into AI. What happens after that? Whatever's required as an input into that, speaking of which, let me ask you about that.…

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