Dwarkesh Patel

Is it to coerce and threaten and bully every single company that won't do business with the government on exactly the terms that the government demands?

Now, remember that the whole background of this AI conversation is that we are in a race with China.

But what is the reason that we want to win this race?

It's because we don't want the winner of the AI race to be a government which believes that there is no such thing as a truly private citizen or a private company.

And that if the state wants you to provide them with a service that you find morally objectionable, you are not allowed to refuse.

And if you do refuse, they will destroy your business.

Are we really racing to beat China and the CCP in AI just so we can adopt the most ghoulish parts of their system?

Now, people will say our government is democratically elected.

So it's not the same thing when they tell you what you must do.

But I refuse to accept this idea that if a democratically elected leader hypothetically tells you to help him do mass surveillance or violate the rights of your fellow citizens or to help him punish his political enemies, that not only is that OK, but that you have a duty to help him.

Honestly, a big worry I have is that mass surveillance, at least in certain forums, is already legal.

It is just an impractical to enforce, at least so far.

Under current law, you have no Fourth Amendment protection against any data that you share with a third party.

That includes your bank, your ISP, your phone carrier, and your email provider.

The government reserves the right to purchase and read this data in bulk without a warrant.

What's been missing is the ability to actually do anything with all this data.

No agency has the manpower to monitor every single camera and read every single message and cross-reference every single transaction.

However, that bottleneck goes away with AI.

There are 100 million CCTV cameras in America, and you can get pretty good open source multimodal models for 10 cents per million input tokens.

So if you process a frame every 10 seconds, and if each frame is, say, 1,000 tokens, then for $30 billion, you can process every single camera in America.