Dean Ball

But I feel as though it is very hard.

I've always felt this way.

It's very hard to have these debates in earnest without speaking honestly about the health of one side of that institutional puzzle, right?

Because if we're saying, oh, well, we should trust the government to nationalize this technology.

Well, are you sure?

By the way, this was the animating thing for me that got me into this was when, during the Biden administration, when it felt like we were heading in this direction too, and there was all this talk of national security-laden regulation that seemed like it would result in soft or hard nationalization of the frontier labs.

It was always, to me, like the...

I mean, I have, number one, I have concerns about that just at a structural level, at a, like, you know, should the government have control over this technology, which will be so important to my own expression.

But also, number two, I think we have to be honest that, you know, the health of our Republican institutions right now is probably at a nadir.

And so it feels, it feels, it's very, again, it's just, it's hard to speak honestly.

Because you have to say, like, well, look,

There's a general point that there's very powerful technology being built here, right?

And that it might affect the balance of power in our society in really, really profound ways.

It might break lots of institutions.

It might cause all sorts of assumptions that we have that undergird the design of the world now.

It might cause those assumptions to break.

And that's all very scary.

And we need there to be a form of public input into that.

But the problem is the mechanism through which we exercise public input formally in the government is at its like there's just this inherent weakness in our governmental institutions right now.

So should we be trusting those in a world where like this is being built anyway?