Derek Thompson

I don't feel like it has transformed the texture of my life, and I'm still not sure that even something as powerful as recursive self-improvement over years will necessarily change the moment to moment of a lot of people's lives.

It'll be a powerful technology, but will it change the experience of life

at the same level of plumbing or electricity.

I don't know yet.

But where I definitely agree is that

There are extremes that we want to avoid.

The extreme of giving up society to corporate power, which builds artificial intelligence, and the extreme of putting our heads in the sand and ignoring this thing as if it's just vaporware and a scam.

And so I hope that we build the right sort of technocratic tools to marshal it, but I

I'm still concerned about those two trains that I described.

The train of executive power and the train of AI seems to me to be a pretty nauseous one-two punch.

I'll give you the last word here.

You catch my drift?

I do.

I do.

Yeah, absolutely.

And yeah, I guess the very last thing that I will say, and I feel like I've had now like three concluding comments here, but you just keep sparking thoughts.

You know, I go back to the beginning of our conversation that the Trump administration came in

ironically, trying to treat this technology as a little bit more akin to a normal technology that we would want to globalize and diffuse around the world, but that this showdown between anthropic and the Department of War has them treating the technology in a way that is highly regulatory, maybe more aggressively regulatory than almost any other country in the world.

And that tells me that this technology is going to be one of those things where the best laid plans are doomed to fail when they make contact with reality.

And even an administration that comes in and says, we're going to treat this technology as if it's normal is treating this technology right now