Rob, Luisa, and the 80000 Hours team

Yeah.

Okay.

So the third mechanism is cultural disempowerment.

I think this is the most original of the three in the paper.

I think maybe also the hardest to get to grips with.

I think people are still trying to figure out exactly what are these forces and what would cultural disempowerment look like.

But yeah, can you give us like what's the state of knowledge at the moment?

Yeah, I guess it's already the case that I feel, I mean, I think it's like getting close to the point where I spend 50% of my time or something in the office, like basically speaking or interacting with AIs of one form or another.

So it's definitely true that kind of their beliefs effectively or kind of memes that are propagating through LLMs are kind of propagating through me and then affecting my actions.

What are some of the ways that like current economic or cultural forces are pushing us towards less than desirable outcomes today?

Yeah, I think the cases that stick out most in my mind are we still have violence and still have war, despite the fact that that's negative some and not really in the endorsed interest of any particular group relative to a negotiated agreement that would get you to the same outcome without having to go through the violence first.

Another one that stands out to me is I feel like capitalism, despite doing many good things for our quality of life, it hasn't really solved the problem of addiction to things that feel good right now but lead you towards negative outcomes in the future.

I guess clickbait and wasting time online is one example of that.

Possibly another one is addictive substances.

Despite the fact that there are market forces that push towards...

helping people with addiction and reducing addiction to drugs.

There are also market forces that push towards innovation and the creation of new, even more addictive drugs.

And so we end up at some sort of equilibrium where sometimes drug addiction gets better and sometimes it gets worse.

But ultimately, market forces have not been able to fix the problem for us.

Do you have a reaction to that?