Brad Carson: belief

Transcript context

…to prevent wars as much as it is into fighting wars? I don't think we are, to be honest with you. I mean, you can think ambitiously about this, where maybe AI systems become a common source of knowledge. You know, the Chinese are reading DeepSeek. I'm reading DeepSeek. I use all the Chinese models a lot in my home in Tulsa. You know, Moonshot, Kimi, DeepSeek, Quinn, they're great, remarkable models. You know, maybe like they give us a common operating picture or give us insights, you know, that get us out of our kind of insularity a bit. Maybe that's the best hope for it on this. I do think the government should do a lot more kind of track 2 talks with Chinese scientists. You know, we should be engaging them more. Again, the Soviets are a great example of this. We had a lot of talks, constant scientific communication, discussions back and forth, even when we were at each other's throats and the future of Earth hung in the balance. Right? We still did those things. It doesn't Can make any you educate me? What is a track to talk? A track to are when people who are former government officials, usually not in government today, are over there talking. Like, I've done this a lot on the military side. As a former Department of Defense official, I would go to Shanghai or Beijing, and you would talk to also former defense officials there. We still have lots of friends, and so we would talk and discuss the American perspective. They would give the Chinese perspective. And then you'd come back and you'd tell the people who were in office, like, you know, this guy who's still best friends with the defense minister, you know, believes this, and here's his take on things or his interpretation of American actions. So it's a low stakes way for people in governments to talk to 1 another. They usually are the preview for kind of talks among the principles themselves. So that's what a track 2 talk is. And we should be doing those in AI. And people are trying to do that, you know, getting Stuart Russell or Benji over to China to talk about the Western perspective, to learn about how do the Chinese think about x risk, about discrimination, about the military applications of this? Like, what do they think? Because I think, you know, coming back to, like, the Soviet example, which I brought up several times, there was a time in my life when I was fascinated by this question. And they were opening up the archives after the Soviet Union fell. And a lot of historians were going in writing these alternative histories of the Cold War, looking at the actual papers of the Soviets. d they were opening up the archives after the Soviet Union fell. And a lot of historians were going in writing these alternative histories of the Cold War, looking at the actual papers of the Soviets. And, you know, they were, like, evaluating, what did the Russians really think about this? Like, we had this view in America of how they interpreted the world. And like, what did they really think? Like, what were the Politburo minutes about this? Or what was the, you know, the army writing about this kind of stuff? And it turns out, like, we got it all wrong mostly. Right? We we we totally misinterpreted a lot of what the Soviets were doing and saw aggression where there wasn't, or we saw nothing where there actually was aggression. And to me, that's like, I think, a powerful lesson about the Chinese. It is a different culture. 1 rich, proud, vibrant, and on the come. Right? And have no illusions that we actually understand, like, what they think about these things. And don't fall into the trap of either marrying yourself or also just presuming, right, that they're, you know, nefarious and evil minded, and are ready to destroy the world to achieve their ambitions. Recognize that they're a competitor minimally, an adversary maybe, right, but try to like understand them better. And these track 2 talks are part of that, but across the board, Americans should be trying to understand China a lot more. That's a huge weakness for us. I do think we're in this stage now of where we are just kind of projecting our worst fears onto them. I mean, don't you think AI could could go a long way to help in diplomatic modeling? I mean, or diplomatic understanding? I mean, why not? Like, it seems like these tools could be directed at at, like I said, preventing war and and furthering understanding…

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