Arthur Kroeber: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, especially given the availability of compute in China. Right. The ability to concentrate your limited compute resources in one thing instead of scattered around. I think that's a fair point. That then comes back to how fast can they solve the chip problem domestically. If they can solve that really fast, then that constraint goes away. One thing that will be important as this AI stuff is happening, is to have something that is equivalent to the red telephone. I do buy some of the crazy or scary stories about what could happen with AI. It’s not necessarily because God takes over, but more so… It's happened many times in human history that some more coordinated group has managed to do some coup or slowly take over control. It’s the kind of thing Cortés did or Pizarro did. A key way that can be prevented, or a way we can reduce the risk of that, is that different human groups should be in tight contact with each other and have the same kind of mechanism that vaccination creates with diseases. The key advantage that the Spanish had over the New World empires was that the Spanish knew how each previous conquest had gone, but the Incas and the Aztecs didn't know about what strategies were used, how horses work, how steel works. How that translates here is that there might be some crazy things these AIs try. Especially if you have this bifurcated world, which is actually very valuable from an alignment and safety perspective because you have this independent experiment or independent lineage… If their AI tries to do something crazy, it's very important that they feel that they can tell us and we do the exact opposite. It's a long preamble to ask the question of how we set up that kind of high trust or prerequisite understanding on these kinds of issues.…

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