Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…That’s a whole other issue of how economic distribution works. I don’t know. That’ll be rough. I’m just saying, I don’t see the alternative. The alternative is overturning a 500-year civilizational achievement of Landfrieden. You basically instantly leak the stuff to the CCP. Either you barely scrape ahead, but you’re in a fever struggle, proliferating crazy WMDs. It’s enormously dangerous for alignment because you’re in a crazy race at the end, and you don’t have the ability to take six months to get alignment right. The alternative is not bundling efforts to win the race against authoritarian powers. I don’t like it. I wish we used the ASI to cure diseases and do all the good in the world. But it’s my prediction that in the end game, what’s at stake is not just cool products but whether liberal democracy survives, whether the CCP survives. What will the world order for the next century be? When that is at stake, forces will be activated that are way beyond what we’re talking about now. In this crazy race at the end, the national security implications will be the most important. To go back to World War II, nuclear energy had its day, but in the initial period when the technology was first discovered, you had to stabilize the situation. You had to get nukes and do it right. Then the civilian applications had their day. I agree that nuclear energy is a thing that happened later on and is dual-use. But it’s something that happened literally a decade after nuclear weapons were developed. Right because everything took a long time.…

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