Dean Ball

And that could be an example.

And I think, like, the broad way to think about this is just a devolution into sort of more medieval-like tendencies where there was no state that exercised... There was a... You know, the Holy Roman Empire existed, right?

And, like...

and projected authority and status and pomp and circumstance, but, um, but did it, you know, it didn't actually like the texture of, of the day-to-day person's life was not all that affected by, you know, the, the decisions of the Holy Roman Emperor.

And, um, I think you could be, you know, in a future like that, where like government governance becomes sort of radically decentralized in part to sort of private actors.

Well, number one, I think there's no version of the future that doesn't involve quite fundamental and radical technological transformation, right?

So like the day-to-day character of your life will just be really, really quite different.

And what you do and what you're capable of doing and the kinds of things you worry about and the kinds of things you don't worry about will all just be like very, very different.

And I think accepting that is hard in and of itself.

Like that's hard.

to really emotionally internalize that we're going to do what Tyler Cowen called rebuilding our world, which we've done before.

But this is going to be the first time we do it as true moderns.

So I think you have to establish that as a baseline.

But what I would say is there's this narrow path in the middle we can walk.

There's one version of the world where the public institutions of today essentially prop themselves up by nationalizing.

They nationalize the frontier labs.

They prop themselves up on the power and wealth issue.

of frontier AI and they don't really get any better or healthier, but they're still kind of there as this kind of like corrupt rentier class that hovers over all of us.

And, you know, it's probably mass surveillance and all that stuff.

And, you know, maybe in 50 years, like technically you vote, but like not really, you know, and that's kind of, that's kind of one bad version of the future.