Dwarkesh Patel

And the problem is this, that structurally, AI favors many authoritarian applications.

Mass surveillance being one of them.

Even if Anthropic refused to sell its models to the government to enable mass surveillance, and even if the next two companies after Anthropic did the same, in 12 months, everybody and their mother will be able to trade a model as good as the current frontier.

And at that point, there will be some vendor who is willing and able to help the government enforce mass surveillance.

So the only way we can preserve our free society is if we make laws and norms through our political system that is unacceptable for the government to use AI to enact mass censorship and surveillance and control.

Just as after World War II, the whole world set this norm that you are not allowed to use nuclear weapons to wage war.

I want to be clear here.

These are extremely confusing and difficult questions to think about.

And even in the very process of brainstorming this video, I changed my mind back and forth on them a bunch.

And I reserve the right to change my mind again.

In fact, I think it's essential that we change our mind as AI progresses and we learn more.

That's the very point of conversation and debate.

Someday people will look back on this time the way we look back on the Enlightenment.

People having these big, important debates, just as the world is about to undergo these huge technological and social and political revolutions.

And some of the thinkers even managed to get a couple of the big questions right, for which we today are still the beneficiaries.

We owe it to our future to at least try to think through the new questions that are raised by AI.

Okay, this was a narration of an essay that I also released on my blog at dvorkash.com.

You should sign up there for my newsletter for future essays like this.

Otherwise, I will see you for the next podcast interview.

Cheers.