David Duvenaud

Yeah.

And I want to give it a shout out to my co-author, Jan Kovalt, who is really the person who pushed for this and developed this thesis in the paper.

Yeah.

So the basic idea is that, you know, culture is this other sort of replicator, sort of like Richard Dawkins talks about memetics and stuff.

And they can serve humans sort of better or worse.

And in the past, especially this is in the past, like things like tradition changed.

cultural norms were actually very important for society to work at all.

And there was like important sort of selection effects that meant that when groups had like bad enough culture, they would somehow be less competitive and one way or another adopt it or be taken over by a group that had like a more effective culture.

Like maybe the most extreme example of this is the Cathars, which was like a Christian sect that believed in no violence and no sex.

And they eventually... I haven't met a Cathar recently.

Yeah, exactly.

And so these selection pressures that meant that like having bad culture meant that you might not like reproduce or your civilization might die are much weaker than they used to be, partly because we're richer than we used to be and probably because we have this one global culture.

And actually Robin Hanson is always saying, guys, this is really scary.

We've lost this sort of like group selection effects and our culture is sort of randomly drifting in a way that no one is controlling.

This is likely to lead it to be worse just in expectation.

So that's that's one weak effect that used to keep culture roughly in line with human flourishing that's going away.

The other thing that's going to start to happen is machines producing culture, right?

Like once machines sort of like become more like agents with their own independent beliefs and sort of point of view on the world, talking more directly to each other, then this is like a new thing in history, which is there's like a new vessel of cultural sort of memes and creation and just like norms that can be operating sort of almost mostly independently from humans.

And it could end up developing in a kind of anti-human way.

And then the third thing is just we're going to be spending so much time talking to machines that this is like a new way that culture is going to transmit.