David Duvenaud

And, like, one story told by, like, Alan Defoe in one of his papers is that the reason that, like, for instance, like, Prussia started educating its citizenry in, like, the 1700s was because musket armies were becoming more competitive than, like, the old, like, you know, knights and sort of, like, poorly armed peasants armies.

And that...

You needed to educate your massive citizens enough that they could form these like musket armies.

And this was just a more competitive option and that the elites resisted this.

Like they didn't want to like have this more empowered citizenry, but they were forced by competitive pressures to become more like these modern democratic, like human capital invested states.

So that being the sort of like birth story is kind of maybe evidence that the same thing can happen in reverse.

Yes, but again, I feel like that's not the headline story in the sense that we already, again, I think don't have that great control of our civilization at the top level.

And this has just been sort of okay because wherever we go, humans were indispensable.

And so the fact that we switch between monarchies to democracies and capitalism versus socialism, yes, these definitely matter for the quality of life and growth of different countries.

But ultimately, you're probably going to survive whatever change in government happens.

So it's not necessarily really autocracy or whatever particular form of government.

That's the big change here.

Yeah, totally.

That's one of the other effects making the government not care enough as much about what the people think is just, yeah, their inability to strike or coup or basically advocate for themselves.

Well, again, I feel like even if there's a human head of state, like, I mean, one example, again, we can come back to is the monarchy where like, how did the monarchy end up not actually controlling the organs of the British state?

And it happened very gradually.

And basically, all the important decision making and discussion happened in these other organs like parliament and just like the free press and stuff like that.

But again, whether it's human or AI control at the top, I think, doesn't really matter.

It's just whether the incentives of the state are aligned with those of its citizens.

And so again, I would be really scared of an even human dictator that didn't need human citizens.