David Duvenaud

I'm a computer scientist.

I am an amateur in all these things.

And I think the big thing that's mostly been missing from people who have expertise that could and should, I think, be contributing to this is like...

I don't know, being a bit head in the sand about like, will there be machines that are competitive with humans in all domains?

And like, you know, economists will just run models that end up with, like end with machines being really good compliments to human labor.

And then that's like, you know, anything more seems like somehow like inviolable or like unimaginable.

And again, I'm like, I know there are economists who are like taking this seriously, but most of them I think aren't.

And it's just like,

I want to be harsh, but I want to say like, this is sad and you're not doing your job.

And like, please try harder and have a bigger imagination.

Yeah.

I guess I'll say there are some cool directions that a lot of people are exploring, like trying to simulate little parts of civilization.

One cool thing you can do with LLM is make this little village or little mini economy that operates at a much finer grained level of detail than the normal economic models.

And so that's sort of its own little new field that's emerging.

And I really think this is going to help us get a grip on when are different types of things stable?

What are the actual drivers of cultural evolution or political stability?

They're still very ridiculously oversimplified models, but it's like, this is a new tool we have.

I'm really happy about this kind of work.

Yeah.

So, I mean, one of the first things to do in any debate is try to clarify the questions.