Rob Wiblin
speaker
1,787 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard May 2025
Rob Wiblin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Um so they had this protective barrier and that gave them um a a degree of discretion that I don't think they you know, if they were on the on the steps of Asia, I think they would not have had nearly uh the the the freedom of movement that they that they had as an as as an island and they would have felt the the pressure and the and the fear of invasion, like it would have been much more salient and they would have just been much more
focused on being up to d to defend themselves.
And I suppose it gave them
breathing room that allowed them to fall quite a bit behind.
But at some point they fell so far behind that even even the the the the sea barrier was not enough to to keep them safe from invasion.
Uh and at that point they basically they they they I guess did a complete one eighty and decided to to catch up and and and modernize.
So I guess the reason we're talking about technological determinism is that many, many people in our circles are very focused on this idea of differential technological development.
I guess a related, more recent idea is um was defensive accelerationism.
uh which is that the way that we want to try to shift history in a positive direction is changing the develop uh shifting the order in the development of technologies or advancing some particular um
lines of science and and research uh to try to get them ahead of of other ones.
And I guess you you want to advance the ones that you think are generally making the world safer, um, so that you have like more of those technologies by the time other more, more risk uh increasing technologies um arrive on the arrive on the scene.
What does the you know discipline of around technological determinism say about whether this is a viable pursuit and a and a sensible approach to trying to uh influence history in a good direction?
I mean, in the archetypal case that we're talking around here, uh, with artificial intelligence and and AI alignment methods.
Doesn't feel uh well on one hand you you gotta say, well, we've gotta have like two different viable paths where, you know, some incremental effort might push us in one direction versus another.
It doesn't feel quite as binary as that, because you can imagine
Almost everyone thinks that uh you know AI companies are gonna put some effort into alignment.
They that they do care that the models do uh broadly speaking, what what what's being asked.
And the idea is, well, we just wanna do more we want to do more of that than the market might provide.
So it's not that we're choosing between, you know, a ag aggressively non-aligned AI that uh someone really wants.
It's more just
Showing 721–740 of 1,787 · page 37 of 90
← Previous
Next →