Dwarkesh Patel

fully autonomous robot armies.

And we just can't have private companies developing the technology that will make all this possible.

But you can make the same argument about the Industrial Revolution.

From the perspective of 17th century Europeans, you've got all kinds of crazy shit in the world today that is a result of the Industrial Revolution.

Chemical weapons, aerial bombardment, not to mention nuclear weapons themselves.

And the way we dealt with this is

is not giving the government absolute control over the Industrial Revolution, which is to say, over modern civilization itself.

Rather, we banned and regulated the specific weaponizable end use cases.

And we should regulate AI in a similar way, which is that we should regulate specific destructive use cases.

For example, launching cyber attacks, things which should be illegal even if a human was doing them.

And we should also have laws which regulate how the government can use this technology.

For example, by building an AI-powered surveillance state.

The second reason that Ben's analogy to some monopolistic private nuclear weapons developer breaks down is that it's not just one company that can develop this technology.

There are many other frontier AI labs that the government could have turned to.

The government's argument that it had to usurp the private property rights of this specific company in order to get access to a critical national security capability is extremely weak if it could have just instead made a voluntary contract with one of Anthropic's half a dozen other competitors.

If in the future that stops being the case, and if only one entity remains capable of building the robot armies and the superhuman hackers, and we have reason to worry that with their insurmountable lead, they could even take over the whole world, then I agree that would be unacceptable for that entity to be a private company.

And so honestly, I think my crux against the people who argue that AI is such a powerful technology that it cannot be shaped by private hands is just that I expect this technology

to be very multipolar.

And I expect there to be lots of competitive companies at each layer of the supply chain.

And unfortunately, it's for this reason that I don't think that individual acts of corporate courage solve the problem.