188. Will AI Give China or the US Total Power? (William MacAskill)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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It's reasonably likely that a single country ends up with 99% of the world economic and military power.
99%?
Yeah, or more, essentially. Despite all of the hype around AI, I think people are underappreciating the risks. You could have a world where you have a military consisting of millions of autonomous weapons controlled by a single person. In the US, the commander-in-chief, the most intense concentration of power the world's ever seen. The US could just say, OK, we're just going to go it alone. And then at that point, all other countries are just locked out of most economic power. And that would be sufficient for total hegemony over the world.
Which of the two current commanders-in-chief of the two biggest militaries, Xi Jinping and Trump, who is winning that race?
What is the potential impact of AI on global power dynamics?
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How could autonomous weapons change military command?
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Welcome to The Rest Is Politics Leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And today we have with us Wilma Gaskell, which is taking us a little bit out of the mainstream of politics into a really interesting thinker who hopefully will make you all sit up. and reconsider your lives in pretty fundamental ways. He's not quite Robert Sapolsky, our great baboon expert in terms of going in a different direction, because Will is somebody who thinks deeply about our moral obligations to the world. So he's talked about how we should deal with poverty, how we should deal with climate change, how we should deal about energy, how we should think about AI, how we should think about democracy.
And as you may be picking up in the course of this huge list of things, Will is a philosopher. he's a philosopher of a very unusual practical bent. He's particularly famous for his commitment to effective altruism, which is the idea that you should be spending your own personal money effectively to make the world a better place, think hard about what it means to make the world a better place and how to do that most efficiently. But he's also quite well known for living what he preaches. He gives away a very, very large amount of his own money, which we'll get into a little bit. And he's somebody who's known a lot of the grandest figures of our age, which we may touch on as well. So, Wilt, thank you very much for joining us today.
Thanks so much for having me on the show. It's a real honour.
Can I start with the philosopher label? Because if we were Le Reste et la Politique, a French podcast, we'd be sort of bowing down before you, being labeled a philosopher, because they love the idea of their philosophers as sort of great intellectual leaders. Where I still think in Britain, there's a sort of sense, well, if you're a philosopher, you're basically somebody just… sit somewhere reading books and you don't really contribute much to the world. What's your definition of what a philosopher is?
So, I mean, I think that's fair. And I think a lot of philosophers do just sit around reading books and, you know, a life I could well have entered had I not started thinking about effective altruism would have been working on extremely interesting problems of logic and language that I was very interested in would have been wonderfully satisfying life and completely pointless.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:57
2
What is the potential impact of AI on global power dynamics?
0:57–1:38
3
How could autonomous weapons change military command?
1:38–10:43
4
What are the ethical implications of effective altruism in tech?
10:43–15:44
5
What defines a philosopher's role in society according to the guest?
15:44–26:48
6
How does effective altruism challenge traditional views on charity?
26:48–1:04:01
Speakers
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