Scott Alexander

Otherwise you end up with like this horrifying dictatorship or oligarchy.

And like, so it feels like all that stuff has to go, right?

And we depict it all going mostly right in one ending of our story.

But, yeah, it's kind of rough.

If I may add to that, so one thing by the government, I think what Scott meant is the executive branch, especially the White House.

So we are depicting a sort of information asymmetry where like the judiciary is kind of out of the loop and the Congress is out of the loop and it's like mostly the executive branch that's involved.

Two, we're not depicting governments, like, ultimately ending up in total control at the ends.

We're thinking that, like, there's an information asymmetry between the CEOs of these companies and the presidents, and they... It's alignment problems all the way down.

Yeah, and so, for example, like...

I'm not a lawyer.

I don't know the details about how this would work out, but I have a sort of high-level strategic picture of the fight between the White House and the CEO.

And the strategic picture is basically the White House can sort of threaten, here's all these orders I could make, Defense Production Act, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I could do all this terrible stuff to you and basically disempower you and take control.

And then the CEO can be like threatened back and be like, here's how we would fight it in the courts.

Here's how we would fight it in the public.

Here's all this stuff we would do.

And after then they both do their posturing with all their threats.

Then they're like, okay, how about we have a contract that like, you know, instead of executing on all of our threats and having all these crazy fights in public, we'll just like come to a deal and then have a military contract that like sets out like who gets to call what shots in the company.

And so that's what we depict happening is that sort of like

They don't blow up into this huge power struggle publicly.