Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think I’d also mention the homogeneity point. Any group of humans, even if they’re all exactly the same race and gender, is going to be much more diverse than the army of AIs in the data center, because they’ll mostly be literal copies of each other. And I think that goes for a lot. Another thing I was going to mention is that our scenario doesn’t really explore this. I think in our scenario, they’re more like a monolith. But historically, a lot of crazy conquests happened from groups that were not at all monoliths. And I’ve been heavily influenced by reading the history of the conquistadors, which you may know about. But did you know that when Cortez took over Mexico, he had to pause halfway through, go back to the coast, and fight off a larger Spanish expedition that was sent to arrest him? So the Spanish were fighting each other in the middle of the conquest of Mexico. Similarly, in the conquest of Peru, Pizarro was replicating Cortez’s strategy, which, by the way, was “go get a meeting with the emperor and then kidnap the emperor and force him at sword point to say that actually everything’s fine and that everyone should listen to your orders”. That was Cortez’s strategy, and it actually worked. And then Pizarro did the same thing, and it worked with the Inca. But also with Pizarro, his group ended up getting into a civil war in the middle of this whole thing. And one of the most important battles of this whole campaign was between two Spanish forces fighting it out in front of the capital city of the Incas. And more generally, the history of European colonialism is like this, where the Europeans were fighting each other intensely the entire time, both on the small scale within individual groups, and then also at the large scale between countries. And yet nevertheless they were able to carve up the world and take over. And so I do think this is not what we explore in the scenario, but I think it’s entirely plausible that even if the AIs within an individual company are in different factions, they might nevertheless overall end up quite poorly for humans. Okay, so we’ve been talking about this very much from the perspective of zoom out and what’s happening on these log-log plots or whatever, but 2028 superintelligence, if that happens, the normal person, what should their reaction to this be? I don’t know if ‘emotionally’ is the right word, but their expectation of what their life might look like, even in the world where there’s no doom. By no doom, you mean no misaligned AI doom?…

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