Dean Ball: belief

Transcript context

…... is there a way for the private actors to really push back on that? In the end, the US government retains the monopoly on legitimate violence, and in the end, there's nothing that stops the US government from not just doing what you just described, but the question for what you just described, the practical question would be, okay, US government, but where are you gonna get the compute? Where are you gonna get the compute? But the thing is that USG can use the Defense Production Act and say, "We are..." It's called the priorities authority. We can, and the government uses this all the time. Priorities authority is a very commonly used part of the DPA, very well understood in the law. This isn't, this is not pushing the bounds of the law at all. This is very established. The US, if the president makes the determination that advanced AI computing hardware is scarce and essential for the national security, he can use or delegate to various cabinet secretaries. He can bring to bear Defense Production Act Title I, and he can say, "We want priority on the compute. You have to serve..." We, they still, you, the US government still has to pay you a market rate for that compute. So th- there's marginal costs associated with this, and it's not clear where the government would even get the money for that, but maybe they invent it somewhere. Who knows? They issue debt or something. Certainly they can, but they, it's not like they have the free cash flow right now to do that. But, but they could, in principle, yes, they could say to, like, all the hyperscalers, "You must give us priority. Our needs come before anybody else, and we have effectively infinite needs. Therefore, in practice, we're gonna crowd out the rest of the market." Plausible. Plausible to do. I think practically it's hard to get that many people. It's hard to generate the institutional wherewithal to do that. Even Los Alamos, the DOE National Labs are not... They're, the way that they're structured i- is as basically fiefs that the president only exercises control over. Um, so there, but in principle, it's possible, and I think what you basically just have to trust is a couple of things. uctured i- is as basically fiefs that the president only exercises control over. Um, so there, but in principle, it's possible, and I think what you basically just have to trust is a couple of things. Number one, that the government's not gonna wanna do that because the government ultimately knows that it can't kill the goose that lays the golden egg. The state exists, and has existed forever, um, since the formation of modern states. The state exists in this kind of, um, interdependence with capital, basically. And there's a great book called Coercion, Capital & European States, 200 pages, not that long, by a guy named Charles Tilly, which is about this history, about how there were these, like, merchant capitalists, and then there were, like, these, these sort of like state actors who Tilly argues basically come out of, it's a form of organized crime. Uh, like basically just like gangsters, right? And like, they had to like, ultimately they had, they have tensions with one another, but they also both need one another, and that formed this kind of complex that still exists. And the ability of either... Neither one of those, it, on paper, the government, on paper, the American AI companies have the ability to exit, right? They could move to another jurisdiction, and they could, they could leave. And on paper, the US government has the ability to seize all of their stuff and take all the researchers and do whatever. But neither of those things happen in reality, 'cause those are asymptotic outcomes, and instead there's this kind of like very complex tension. So you have to hope that the US government realizes that there are medium and long-term costs as opposed to the short-term benefits that you might get from seizing control. And then the other thing would be, this is where broad diffusion is really important. Because what I want is I want fable at better level models in the hands of all sorts of people, individual Americans, businesses of all industries. Because if the AI industry says, the AI industry lobbyists say, "Please, don't nationalize us. Don't do X, Y, and Z to us," the US government cares about that, but like it's one lobby, and it's one lobby for a politically unpopular group. But if every bank in America feels dependent on AI, if every, uh, of all the universities in America are integrating it deeply, if all the major industries and social actors in this country are integrating it, then all of a sudden, like I have a much bigger group of interest groups that I can bring to bear to, to affect that. And as a private, as someone who observes this balance between private and public, I wanna think of AI not as a specific industry with specific interest groups, but as instead basically it's just capital. And so I want like all the capitalists on, on the side of AI. And the way you do that is through broad diffusion. And I think that is why broad diffusion to me, in the context of a democratic republic with lots of interest group, Madisonian groups jostling and ambition checking ambition, that's how you keep the balance.…

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