Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And in the end the Kaiser says “I think I can do without you.” The Kaiser was wrong, of course, and everything immediately started going downhill for Germany thereafter. And in some weird ways, also parallel to the AI argument, a lot of the key people around Europe started sort of wistfully saying, “Well, you know, it was a nightmare to deal with this terrible, superhuman AI, but it wasn’t a pirate. It wasn’t insane. You could at least negotiate surrender. It wasn’t just a berserk pirate.” Some of them almost felt nostalgic for its rationality after it had gone. Another analogy here is it set up all these things that nobody understands, these systems of alliances and relationships in Europe. And you can imagine, like an AI advisor, and you’re not sure what’s going on, but it’s making, I don’t know, maybe it’s like a hedge fund manager that’s AI and it’s like making a lot of money. And then you’re like, but I don’t trust it. I’m going to shut it off. And then a few years later, there’s like a huge financial collapse because it was doing something you didn’t realize that was super important. You shut it off. You didn’t understand what it was doing that was super important. You shut it off. Suddenly all the shit that it tried to do goes to shit. And you have World War I. Your interpretability program that’s running it doesn’t really work. It can’t really explain to you why it’s doing these things. And then you think, “Oh, well, it all looks a bit murky, I’ll close it down.” And then you find out that actually the structure that it built was super valuable.…

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