Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…How much should we worry about this opening up the whole system to fragilities, if there’s like no one mind that understands large parts of how everything fits together? People talk about this in the context of if there’s a war in China, and the producers didn’t think about that possibility when they put valuable manufacturing in Taiwan and stuff like that. No one mind understanding things is inevitable under all systems. This gets into some of the alignment debates. If you had one mind that understood everything or could control everything, you have to worry a great deal about the corruptibility of that mind. So legibility, transparency, are not per se good. You want enough of them in the right places, but you need some kind of balance. So I think supply chains are no longer an underanalyzed problem, but until Covid they were, and they’re a big deal. And the Hayekian argument doesn’t always work, because the signal you have is of the current price. And that’s not telling you how high are the inframarginal values if you get, say, cut off from being able to buy vaccines from India, because you’re at the bottom of the queue. So that was a problem. It was the market failing, because the price doesn’t tell you inframarginal values. And when you move from some ability to buy the output to zero, those inframarginal values really matter. What would Hayek make of AI agents as they get more powerful? You have some market between the AI agents. There’s some sort of decentralized order as a result. What insights would you have about that?…

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