Dean Ball

And yeah, then there's this, like, I think the other point I would make, though, about like the second point, the sort of the AI changing the economics, essentially, of all kinds of, in some sense, the microeconomics of tyranny would be like the way to put this, are like changed on the government side.

But like, the other point is that there's all these institutions of governance that we have that are sort of public civic institutions, right?

And maybe what starts to happen is those things break down.

They become less responsive.

They actually insulate themselves from artificial intelligence.

And at the same time, the cost of replacing them, the cost of essentially privatizing various functions for the same exact reason.

There are all these things that used to require collective effort that we funded through taxation and government.

And now they don't because it's actually far cheaper to do them.

And so now we can privatize all kinds of things.

Could you give an example?

I mean, we're already... The technology making things cheaper has already done this, but let me just... What's a fun example?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics collecting economic data, right?

Like...

they employ all these economists who go out and interview businesses and do all these things.

It seems to me that a company could have a totally different approach to that and actually just replace that function.

And possibly even a non-profit that was funded by some sort of industry consortium.

Because we can no longer trust government, in part because...

the methods are breaking down and the institution of BLS doesn't seem to be updating quickly enough.

And then also there's some people, I don't know, I don't think it's actually been proven true at all yet, but there's some people that were saying, you know, several months ago that, um, uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the statistics, the economic statistics we're going to be messed with politically political will be subject to political interference by the Trump administration.

I don't think that's true, but at some point, I bet you in my lifetime, it will be true.