David Duvenaud

Yeah.

So our main claim is that human control over states is actually already very weak in a lot of ways.

And this is obviously most true in regimes that we think are horrible.

Like think of North Korea.

It's like, well, clearly if the people of North Korea had almost any say in their government, or at least weren't sort of somehow browbeaten or deluded into thinking that what was going on is like good, they would have long ago changed their form of governance.

And of course, you might say that in the West today, we're in a much better situation.

But the overall thesis is like,

We don't have that much ability to control our governments.

And the reason that states have been treating us so well in the West, at least for the last, let's say like two or 300 years, is because they've needed us.

And in particular, because allowing freedom and like private property and basically self-determination has been the most effective recipe for growth.

Right.

And in fact, the ones that do allow humans to participate meaningfully will probably have a competitive disadvantage.

Yeah.

I mean, from the point of view of the state, think about what an unemployed citizen looks like, you know, sort of at best, they're going to leave everything alone and deal with their own problems, but they're going to have a lot more time.

And I think a lot of citizens would end up just being sort of like full-time activists and

And they might feel like they're forced to because if their only source of income is something like UBI, then the entire game going forward for economic advancement is do some sort of activism to convince the government to give your group more UBI.

So this is going to make politics just much more high stakes and unstable.

And so governments that don't

sort of disempower their citizens one way or another, are going to be facing these constant pressures and being sort of blown around by who's winning the activism war this week.

And so eventually that's an unstable situation that's going to end up with, I think, people basically being unable to control the levers of power.