Chris Dixon: belief

Transcript context

…Sure. Yes. I think it’s a collective action problem. Does AI help with that? Maybe. I don’t know. I think AI can do a lot of really, really interesting things. I do think a lot of the most challenging things we have in the world right now, and a lot of the gating factors to productivity, economic growth, and just human well-being, I believe, are collective action problems, coordination problems, getting people to agree on something. Look at the internet. How did the internet change politics? The internet changed politics by changing the way information flows, and I think we’re only beginning to see the effects of that. I think one way to think about the internet is social. Technology always has first-order and second-order effects. The first-order effect of the automobile was, you can get from point A to point B faster. The second-order effect was suburbs, trucking, highway systems, all the next 50 years. The first order was go somewhere faster. That’s 1900 to 1930 or something. Then the next era was all of the second-order things. I think with the internet, the first-order thing with social media — I can tell people I had a burrito for lunch or something like this. The second order is you suddenly have a whole different political dynamic. You can have an insurgent political movement like Trump or Bernie Sanders, or something that bucks the system and counters the establishment. You can have a whole narrative universe that counters. You have COVID, and you have the establishments world, and then you have the podcasting version of it. It restructured how information flows, and people obviously will debate whether that’s a good or bad thing, but it’s clearly had that, and I think we’re in the very beginning of that. Really, the social media didn’t become a mainstream thing until smartphones, probably — mainstream in a sense of like three billion people — probably until 2012 or something. We’re still relatively early in that development. Now, with AI, I think a big question — it’s very possible in five years that people get all their news and political information from an AI. Who created that AI? Was it created by someone with a political agenda? Is it open source? If I can pick one issue that will make the AI future better, my own belief is that we have very strong open-source AI so that people can have a choice. It can be audited. It can be open. Our kids will be top AI. The news will be formed by AI. To your question on politics, politics is downstream of culture and information flows, and AI will reshape that. Who controls that reshaping, to me, seems like the key question. As you know, not many countries have serious AI companies, and even those in Europe may or may not last. They’re not obviously mega profitable. Let’s say you’re the government of Peru, and you can turn over your education system to some foreign, maybe American, AIs. You can turn over how your treasury is managed to the AIs. You can turn over your national defense to the AIs. None of these are Peruvian companies most likely. In the final analysis, are we even left with the government of Peru? Or has it, in some sense, been pseudo privatized to the companies that are running the structures, and indeed to the AI itself?…

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