Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right, it could go either way. But these problems with authoritarianism get deeper. I wonder if that’s an indicator of other problems that authoritarianism will have. In other words, because authoritarianism becomes worse, people are more afraid of it. They work harder to stop it. You have to think in terms of total equilibrium. I just wonder if it will motivate new ways of thinking about how to preserve and protect freedom with the new technology. Even more optimistically, will it lead to a collective reckoning and a more emphatic realization of how important some of the things we take as individual rights are? A more emphatic realization that we really can’t give these away. We’ve seen there’s no other way to live that actually works. I am actually hopeful that—it sounds too idealistic, but I believe it could be the case—dictatorships become morally obsolete. They become morally unworkable forms of government and the crisis that that creates is sufficient to force us to find another way. I think there is genuinely a tough question here which I’m not sure how you resolve. We’ve had to come out one way or another on it through history. With China in the ‘70s and ‘80s, we decided that even though it’s an authoritarian system, we will engage with it. I think in retrospect that was the right call, because it’s a state authoritarian system but a billion-plus people are much wealthier and better off than they would’ve otherwise been. It’s not clear that it would’ve stopped being an authoritarian country otherwise. You can just look at North Korea as an example of that. I don’t know if it takes that much intelligence to remain an authoritarian country that continues to coalesce its own power. You can imagine a North Korea with an AI that’s much worse than everybody else’s, but still enough to keep power. In general, it seems like we should just have this attitude that the benefits of AI—in the form of all these empowerments of humanity and health—will be big. Historically, we have decided it’s good to spread the benefits of technology widely, even to people whose governments are authoritarian. It is a tough question, how to think about it with AI, but historically we have said, “yes, this is a positive-sum world, and it’s still worth diffusing the technology.” There are a number of choices we have. Framing this as a government-to-government decision in national security terms is one lens, but there are a lot of other lenses. You could imagine a world where we produce all these cures to diseases. The cures are fine to sell to authoritarian countries, but the data centers just aren’t. The chips and the data centers aren’t, and the AI industry itself isn’t. Another possibility I think folks should think about is this. Could there be developments we can make—either that naturally happen as a result of AI, or that we could make happen by building technology on AI—that create an equilibrium where it becomes infeasible for authoritarian countries to deny their people private use of the benefits of the technology? Are there equilibria where we can give everyone in an authoritarian country their own AI model that defends them from surveillance and there isn’t a way for the authoritarian country to crack down on this while retaining power? I don’t know. That sounds to me like if that went far enough, it would be a reason why authoritarian countries would disintegrate from the inside. But maybe there’s a middle world where there’s an equilibrium where, if they want to hold on to power, the authoritarians can’t deny individualized access to the technology. But I actually do have a hope for the more radical version. Is it possible that the technology might inherently have properties—or that by building on it in certain ways we could create properties—that have this dissolving effect on authoritarian structures? Now, we hoped originally—think back to the beginning of the Obama administration—that social media and the internet would have that property, and it turns out not to. But what if we could try again with the knowledge of how many things could go wrong, and that this is a different technology? I don’t know if it would work, but it’s worth a try.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.