David Duvenaud

I think it's crazy.

And I think, you know, in some sense you could say humans are locusts and that, you know, there was various different human societies and the ones that were effective at, you know, spreading and settling and colonizing new areas did end up dominating in some sense that like the more sedentary ones didn't.

So again, this is like a very simple natural selection story for how the locusts end up coming into being.

Well, I guess I'll say I was drawing this picture before that there might be these two extremes.

One is like total coordination and like hegemony and like this total totalitarian world government or this like unfettered competition.

But empirically, if we look at history, it's been something in between.

It's more chaotic where it's like empires rise and fall.

It's kind of like lava lamp where like, you know, these things grow and then they become unstable.

And same just like ecologically where there's like all these different niches and there's no one.

animal that's like competing all the other animals or coordinating amongst all its copies.

There's like ant colonies, but then they only grow so large before then there's like like sort of traders within like even human cells have cancer.

And that's like a huge problem.

And it's like one of the sort of major things that we pay like an internal alignment tax on to like have this immune system and like

these aging mechanisms that help police cancer.

So it does seem like sort of natural equilibrium in at least a fixed domain is something in between total coordination and total chaos.

So I guess I'll say you can make a case either way.

And again, empirically, we seem to have this like mix and it's not even really an equilibrium.

It's this sort of like meta equilibrium of, you know, larger coordination happening and then dying.

I guess I'll say I think it's also probably going to operate very differently at different scales.

So on the scale of like an island versus like a continent versus a planet versus a solar system versus a galaxy, right?