Tyler Cowen - the #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans

22:47If you read his afferisms, I think he would have actually been pretty good on Twitter. Maybe, but again, you know, like what does the equilibrium look like when everything changes, but clearly he was an impressive guy, especially given how much he drank. Okay, so even if you don't buy the Sandberg kids, if you know, if you know, by the young kids, the other trend he was talking about where if you look at the leaders in government, whatever you think of Trump Biden, we're not talking about Jefferson and Hamilton anymore, right? How do you explain that trend? Well, Jefferson and Hamilton, their founders, right?

23:20And they were pretty young at the time. You can do great things when you're founding a country in a way that just cannot be replicated later on. Putting aside the current year, which I think is weird for a number of reasons, but I think mostly we have had impressive candidates and most of the US bureaucracy in Washington, I think is pretty impressive. Generals, national security people, taught people in agencies, people at Treasury, people at the Fed. And I interact with these groups like pretty often. Overall, they're impressive and I've seen no signs they're getting worse. Now, if you wanna say the two candidates this year, again, there's something we're not gonna talk about, but there is a lot you could say on the negative side, yes.

24:05But like Obama, Romney, whichever one you like, I think like gee, these are two guys who should be running for president and that was not long ago. So then there's a bunch of candidates running who are good. What goal is systematically wrong in the selection process of the two who are selected are not as even as good as the average of all the candidates? You mean this, I'm not talking about American particular. If the theory's just like noise, it seems like it skews one way. Well, the Democrats had this funny path with Biden and Kamala didn't get through the electoral process in the normal way.

24:37So that just means you get weirdness, whatever you think of her as a candidate. Trump, who might do not want to win, but I think he is extraordinarily impressive in some way, which along a bunch of dimensions exceeds a lot of earlier candidates. I just don't like the overall package, but I would not point to him as an example of low talent. I think he's a supreme talent, but harness to some bad ends. If you look at the early 20th century, like some of the worst things that happened to progress is just these psychopathic leaders. What happened? Why did we have so many just awful, awful leaders in the early 20th century?

25:15Well, give me like a country and a name and a time period and I'll try to answer it. I mean, would you want to be a particular... He was from the university. That's what was wrong with him, right? And this thing at what school it was. Who's there? Woodrow Wilson. Yeah. One of our two or three worst presidents on civil rights, World War One, he screwed up the peace process. He screwed up indirectly, led to World War Two, reintroduced segregation of civil service in some key regards and just seemed he was an nasty guy and should have been out of office sooner given his health and state of mind. So he was terrible, but he was sort of on paper, a great candidate.

25:55Hoover on paper was a great candidate and was an extremely impressive guy. I think he made one very bad set of decisions relating to deflation and letting nominal GDP fall. But my goodness, like there's a reason they called it the Hoover Institution after Hoover. But the Hitler Stalin Maoist, which is something that was going on that explains why that was just a crummy time for world leaders. I don't think I have like a good macro explanation of that whole trend, but I would say a few things. That's right after the period where the world is changing the most. And I think when you get big new technologies and this is relevant for AI, you get a lot of new arms races.

26:35And sometimes the bad people win those arms races. So at least for quite a while, you had Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany winning some arms races. And they're not democratic systems. Later you have China with Mao being not a democratic system. And then you have a mix of bad luck. Like Stalin and Mao just draw the urn. You could have gotten less crazy people than what you got. And I agree with Hayek, the worst get to the top under autocracy, but like they're that bad? Like that was just some bad luck too. There's other things you could say, but I think we had a highly disoriented civilization. You see it in aesthetics approaching beginnings of World War I, art, music, radically changing.

27:15People feel very disoriented. There's a lot of for grabs. Imperialism, colonialism start to be factors. Just there wasn't like a stable world order. And then you had some bad luck tossed into that. And all of a sudden these super destructive weapon systems compared to what we had had. And it was awful. I'm not pretending that's some kind of full explanation, but that would be like a partial start. You compare our current period to 17th century England, where you have a lot of new ideas, things go topsy -turvy. What's your theory of why things go topsy -turvy at the same time when these eras come about?

27:49What causes this volatility? I don't think I have a general theory. If you want to talk about 17th century England, so they have the scientific revolution. You have the rise of England as a true global power. Navy becomes much more important. The Atlantic trade route, because of the new world becomes much more important. Places like the Middle East, India, China, that earlier in a Persia had major roles. They're crumbling partially for reasons of their own. And that's going to help the relative power of the more advanced European nations. England has a lot of competition from the Dutch Republic, France, happening at the same time.

28:26That for the first time in human history that I know of, we have sustained economic growth, according to Greg Clark, starting in the 1620s, of about 1 % a year. And that is compounding again. Slow numbers, but compounding. And England is the place that gets the compounding at 1%. Starting in the 1620s, and somehow they go crazy, civil war, kill the king, all these radical ideas, libertarianism comes out of that, which I really like. John Milton, John Locke. Also this brutal conquest of the new world, like very good and very bad coming together. And I think it should be seen as these set of processes were very good and very bad come together.

29:03And we might be inferred dose of that again now soon. Seems like a simple question. But basically, how do you make sure we get the good things and not the crazy civil wars? You can't make sure. I mean, you try at the margin to nudge toward the better set of things. But it's possible that all the technical advances that recently have been unleashed. Now that the great stagnation is over, which of course, include AI, will mean in other crazy period. It's quite possible. I think the chance of that is reasonably high. What's your most underrated cult? Most underrated cult, progress studies. Yeah. I think you called peak EA right before SBF fell.

29:44That's right. I was at an EA meeting. And I said, hey, everyone, this is as good as it gets. Enjoy this moment. It's all basically going to fall apart. You're still going to have some really significant influence. But you won't feel like you have continued to exist as a movement. That's what I said. And they were shocked. They thought I was insane. But I think I was mostly right. And what specifically did you see? What was the exuberance tube high? Did you see SBF's balance sheet? Like, what did you see? Well, I was surprised when SBF was in solvent. I thought it was a high risk venture that had no regulatory defense and would end up being worth zero.

30:22But I didn't think he was actually playing funny games with the money. I just have a long history of seeing movements in my lifetime from the 1960s onwards, including libertarianism. And there are common patterns that happens to them all. We're here in Berkeley, my goodness. Free speech movement. Where's free speech in Berkeley today? Like how that, you know, work out in the final analysis. So it's a very common pattern. And just to think, well, the common pattern is going to repeat itself. And then you see some intuitive signs. And you're just like, yeah, that's going to happen. And the private benefits of belonging to EA, like they were very real in terms of the people you could hang out with or like the sex you could have.

31:01But they didn't seem that concretely crystallized to me in institutions. So where they are, like in Goldman Sachs or legal partnerships. So that struck me as very fragile. And I thought that at the time as well. Sir, I'm not sure I understood. What were the intuitive signs? Well, much seeing like the very clear crystallized permanent incentives to keep on being a part of the institutions. A bit of excess enthusiasm from some people. Even where they might have been correct in their views. Some cult like tendencies, the rise of it being so rapid. That it was this uneasy balance of secular and semi religious elements that tends to flip one way or the other or just dissolve.

31:43So I saw all those things. And I just thought like the two or three best ideas from this are going to prove incredibly important still. And from this day onwards, I don't give up that belief at all. But just as a movement, I thought it was going to collapse. When do we hit peak progress studies? You know, when Patrick and I wrote the piece on progress in progress studies, he and I thought about this, talked about it. I can't speak for him. But my view at least was that it would never be such a formal thing or like controlled or managed or directed by a small group of people or like trademarked or it would be people doing things in a very decentralized way that would reflect a general change of ethos and vibe.

32:27So I hope it has in many ways like a gentler but more enduring trajectory. And I think so far I'm seeing that. Like I think in a lot of countries, science policy will be much better because of progress studies. That's not proven yet. You see some signs of that. You wouldn't say it's really flipped, but a lot of reforms. You're in an area like no one else has any idea, much less a better idea or a good idea. And some modestly small number of people with some talent will work on it and get like a third to half of what they want. And that will have a huge impact. And like if that's all it is, I'm thrilled.

33:03And I think it will be more than that. I asked Patrick yesterday, how do you think about progress studies differently now that you know AI is a thing that's happening? Yeah. What's the answer for you? I don't think about it very differently. But again, if you buy my view about like slow takeoff, why should it be that different? Well, have more degrees of freedom. So if you have more degrees of freedom, all your choices, decisions, issues, problems are more complex. So you're in more need of like some kind of guidance. So all inputs other than the AI, like rise in marginal value. And since I'm an input other than the AI, or I hope that means I rise in marginal value, but I need to do different things.

33:41So I think of myself over time as less a producer of content and more like a connector, people, person, developing networks. In a way where if there somehow had been no like Transformers and LLMs, I would have stayed a bit more as a producer of content. When I was preparing to interview you, I asked Claw to take your persona. And compared to other people I tried this with, it actually works really well with you. Well, because I've written a lot on the internet. Yeah, that's why. This is my immortality, right? That's right. So I've heard you're saying the past, you don't expect to be remembered in the future.

34:16At the time, I don't know if you were considering that because of your volumes of text, you're going to have an especially salient persona in future models. How does that change your estimation of your intellectual contribution going forward? I do think about this. And the last book I wrote, it's called Goat, who's the greatest economist of all time. I'm happy if humans read it, but mostly I wrote it for the AI's. I wanted them to know, I like appreciate them. And my next book, I'm writing even more for the AI's. Again, human readers are welcome. It will be free, but sort of who reviews it? Like, oh, it's TLS gonna pick it up.

34:52Or like it doesn't matter anymore. Like the AI's will trawl it and know I've done this and that will shape how they see me. And I hope a very salient and important way. And as far as I can tell, no one else is doing this. No one is writing or recording for the AI's very much. But if you believe even in a modest version of this progress, like I'm modest in what I believe relative to you and many of you, like you should be doing this. You're an idiot if you're not writing for the AI's. They're a big party or audience and they're purchasing power. We'll see, but over time it will accumulate and they're gonna hold a lot of crypto.

35:31We're not gonna give them bank accounts, at least not at first. What part of your persona will be least captured by the AI's if they're only going by your writing? I think I should ask that as a question to you. What's your answer? I don't think the AI's are that funny yet. They're better on humor than many people alleged, but I don't use them for humor. It's interesting that you learn so much about a person from when you're doing for them for a job or if you for emergent ventures. You can read their application but just in the first 10 minutes, they're vibe. Green minutes, but yes. Yes. And so whatever's going on there, that's so informative.

36:04The AI's won't have just from the writing. Not at first, but I think I've heard of projects. This is second hand. I'm not sure how true it is, but that interviews are being recorded by companies that do a lot of interviews and these will be fed into AI's and coded in particular ways and then people in essence will be tracked through either their progress in the company or linked in profile. And we're gonna learn something about those intangibles that summerate. I'm not sure how that will go, but I don't view it as something we can never learn about. Do you actually have a conscious area of what's going on when you get on a call with somebody and three minutes later, or you're like, you're not getting the grant?

36:42But what happens? Well, often there's like one question the person can't answer. So if it's someone say applying with a nonprofit idea, plenty of people have good ideas for nonprofits and I see these all the time, but when you ask them the question, how is it you think about building out your donor base? It's remarkable to me how many people have no idea how to answer that. And without that, you don't have anything. So it depends on the area, but that would be an example of an area where I ask that question pretty quickly and a significant percentage can't answer it. And I'm still willing to say, well, come back to me when you have a good case.

37:19Oddly, none of those people have ever come back to me that I can think of, but I think over time, somewhere, and that's like a very concrete thing. But there's other intangibles just when you see what the person thinks and talks about too much. So if someone wants to get an award only for their immigration status, that to me is a dangerous sign, even though at the same time, usually you're looking for people who wanna come to the US, whether they can do it or not. And there's just a lot of different signals you pick up, like people somehow have the wrong priorities or they're referring to the wrong status markers.

37:54And it comes through more than you would think. If you just had the transcript of the call, but you couldn't see the video, like you would say no in the case where you could see the video, you might say yes if you see the transcript, what happens in those cases? Having only the transcript would be worth much, much less, I would say, if that's what you're asking. Yeah, it would be maybe 25 % of the value. And what's going on with the 75 %? We don't know, but I think you can become much better at figuring out the other 75%. Partly just with practice. Yesterday Patrick was talking about these concentrations of talent that he sees in the history of science with these labs that have six, seven noble prizes.

38:31And he was also talking about second employee at Stripe as Greg Brockman, he wasn't visible to other parts of the startup ecosystem in the same way. What's your theory of what's going on? Why are these clusters so limited? What's actually being inherited over and transmitted here? Well Patrick was being too modest. I thought his answer there was quite wrong, but he sort of knows better. He was able to hire Greg Brockman because he's Patrick. It's very simple. He wasn't going to come out and just say that. And he may even deny it a bit to himself. But if you're Patrick and John, you're going to attract some Greg Brockmans.

39:07And if you're not, it's just way, way harder. Because the Greg Brockmans are pretty good at spotting who are the Patricks and Johns. So in a way, that's just pushing it back a step, but at least it's answering part of the question in a way that Patrick didn't, because he was modest and humble. It seems like that makes the clusters less valuable than because of Greg Brockman is just Greg Brockman. And Greg chose Patrick and John because they're Patrick and John. And Patrick and John chose Greg because he's Greg. It wasn't that they meet each other great. It was just like Talentsies Talent, right?

39:37Well, they make each other much better. Just like Patrick and John made each other much better and still do. But you're getting back to my favorite human bottleneck. Thank you. I'm fully on board with what you're saying. To get those, like how many Beatles are there? It's amazing how much stuff doesn't really last. And it's just super scarce achievement at the very highest levels. And that's this extreme human bottleneck. And AI, even a pretty strong AI, remains to be seen. How much it helps us with that. I'm guessing ever since you were the Progress Studies article, you got a lot of applications for emerging ventures from people who want to do some progress studies thing.

40:11That's, you know, on the margins you wish you got fewer of those proposals or more of them. Do you just wish they were like unrelated? I don't know, you know, to date, a lot of them have been quite good. And many of them are people who are here. There's a danger that is a thing becomes more popular. You know, at the margin, they become much worse. And I guess I'm expecting that. So maybe mentally I'm raising my own bar on those. And maybe over time, I find it more attractive. If the person is interested in say, like the industrial revolution, if they're interested in progress studies, capital P, capital S, like over time, I'm growing more skeptical of that.

40:51Not that I think there's anything intrinsically bad about it. Like I'm at a progress studies conference with you. But still, when you think about selection and adverse selection, I think you've got to be very careful and keep on raising the bar there. And it's still probably good if those people do something in capital P, capital S progress studies, but it's not necessarily good for emerging ventures to just keep on funding the number. If you buy your picture of AI, where it increases growth rates by half a percentage point, what does your portfolio look like? I can tell you what my portfolio is.

41:23It's a lot of diversified mutual funds with no trading. Basically, pretty heavily US weighted and nothing in it that would surprise you. Now, my wife works for the SEC, so we're not allowed to do most things. Like even to buy most individual stocks, you may not be allowed to do it. Certainly not allowed derivatives or shorting anything. But if somehow that restriction were not there, I don't think it would really matter. So buy and hold, diversify, hold on tight and make sure you have some cheap hobbies and are a good cook. Why aren't you more leverage if you think the growth rate's gonna go off even slightly?

42:00Well, I think I also have this view, maybe a lot of the equity premium is in the past. That people, especially in this part of the world, are very good at internalizing value and it will be held and earned in private markets and by VCs rather than like public pension funds. Why give it to them? I think Silicon Valley has figured this out. Sandhail Road has figured it out. So what one can do with public equities is unclear. What private deals I can get on with my like really tiny sum of wealth, like I would say is pretty clear. So I'm left with that. And like money for me is not what scares. Time is scarce and I do have some very cheap hobbies and I feel I'm in very good shape in that regard.

42:43That being said, I think you could get pretty good deal flow. He would have thought for a while. I don't know, like you can only focus on so many things. So if I have like good deal flow and emergent ventures, which I'm not paid to do, like say I had a billion dollars from whatever, I wouldn't have any better way of spending that billion dollars than like buying myself a job, doing emergent ventures or whatever. So I'm sort of already where I would be if I could buy the thing for a billion dollars. So I'm just not that focused on it. And I think it's good that you limit your areas of focus. And if some people just money, like I think that's great.

43:21I don't begrudge them that at all. I think it's socially valuable. Let's have more of it, bring it on. But it's just not me. When I started my career, it was really unknown that economists could really earn anything at all. Like there weren't no tech jobs with billionaires. Finance was a low paying field. Like when I started choosing a career, it was not a thing, there wasn't this fancy Goldman Sachs. It was a slow boring thing. Programmers were weird people in basements, like maybe who knows, you know, that bad stuff. And then like an economist you would earn, like back then maybe $40 ,000 a year.

43:57Like two people, Mitt and Friedman Paul Sam, you'll send it outside income. And you would know expectation that you would ever earn more than that. And I went into this with all of that, like relative to that, I feel so wealthy. Just like, oh, you can sell some books or you can give a talk or, I don't know, I just feel like I am a billionaire now. And if anything, I want to become what I've called an information trillionaire. I'm not going to make that, but I think it's a good aspiration to have. Just collect more information and be an information trillionaire. Like Dana Joya has that same goal.

44:31He and I've talked about this. I think that's a very worthy goal. Was there a second field that you were considering going to about other than economics? It was either economics or philosophy. And I saw back then, this would be like the late 1970s. It was much harder to get a job as a philosopher, though not impossible the way it sort of is now. And they were paid less and just had fewer opportunities. So I thought, well, I'll do economics. But I think in a way I've always done both. OK, I really want to go back to this diffusion thing we're talking about at the beginning with the economic growth.

45:01Yeah, because I feel like I don't, what am I not understanding? I hear the word diffusion. I hear the word bottlenecks. But I just don't have anything concrete in my head when I hear that. What are the people who are thinking about AI missing here when they just plug in these things into their models? I'm not sure. I'm the one to diagnose. But I would say when I'm in the Bay Area, like the people here, to me, are the smartest people I've ever met on average. Most ambitious, dynamic, and smartest, like by a clear grand slam compared to New York City or London or anywhere. That's awesome. And I love it.

45:37But I think a side result of that is that people here overvalue intelligence. And their models of the world are built on intelligence mattering much, much more than it really does. Now people in Washington don't have that problem. We have another problem. And that needs to be corrected, too. But I just think if you could root that out of your minds, it would be pretty easy to glide into this expert consensus view that tech diffusion is pretty universally pretty slow. And that's not going to change. No one's built a real model to show why it's a change other than sort of hyperventilating blog posts about everything's going to change right away.

46:19The model is that you can have AI's make more AI's, right? That you can have that. Reaching returns. Ricardo knew this, right? He didn't call it AI. But Malthus Ricardo, they all talked about this. It was just humans for them. Well, people then would breed. They would breed at some pretty rapid rate. There were diminishing returns to that. You had these other scarce factors. Glassical economics figured that out. They were too pessimistic, I would say. But they understood the pessimism intrinsic in diminishing returns in a way that people in the Bay Area do not. And it's better for them that they don't know it.

46:52But if you're just trying to inject truth into their veins, rather than ambition, diminishing returns is a very important idea. In what sense was that pessimism correct? Because we do have seven billion people. And we have a lot more ideas as a result. We have a lot more industries. Yeah, I said they were too pessimistic. But they understood something about the logic of diffusion where if they could see AI today, I don't think they would be so blown away by. Oh, you know, I read Malthus. Ricardo would say, Malthus and I used to send letters back and forth. We talked about diminishing returns. This will be nice.

47:24It'll extend the frontier. But it's not going to solve all our problems. What concern you could have of a progress in general is if you look at the famous Adam Smith example, you've got that pin maker. And the specialization obviously has all these efficiencies. But the pin maker is just like he's doing this one thing. Whereas if you're in the ancestral environment, you get to do, you get to basically negotiate with every single part of what it takes to keep you alive and every other person in your tribe. Does individuality, is that like lost with more specialization, more progress? Well, Smith thought it would be.

47:58I think compared to his time, we have much more individuality, most of all in the Bay Area. That's a good thing. I worry, you know, the future with AI that a kind of demoralization will set in some areas. I think there'll be full employment pretty much forever. That doesn't worry me. But what we will be left doing, what exactly it will be and how happy it will make us. Again, I don't have pessimistic expectations. I just see it as a big change. I don't feel I have a good prediction. And if you don't have a good prediction, you should be a bit wary and just like, oh, okay, we're gonna see, but you know, some words of caution are married.

48:38When you're learning about a new field, the vibe I get from you when you're doing a podcast is like you're picking up like the long tail of different, you talk to interesting people or you read the book that nobody else would have considered. How often do you just have to like, you gotta like read the main textbook versus, you can just look at the esoteric thing. How do you balance that trade off? Well, I haven't interviewed that many scientists. Like Ed Boyden would be one, Richard Prom, the ornithologist from Yale. Those are very hard preps. I think those are two excellent episodes, but I'm limited in how many I can do by my own ability to prepare.

49:12I like the most doing historians because the prep is a lot of work, but it's easy fun work for me. And I sort of, I know I always learn something. So now I'm prepping for Stephen Kotkin, who's an expert on Stalin and Soviet Russia. And that's been a blast. I've been doing that for like four months, reading dozens of books, and it's very automatic. Whereas you try to figure out like what Ed Boyden is doing with the light shining into the brain. It's like, oh my goodness, do I understand this at all? Or am I like the guy who thinks the demand curve slopes upward? So it just means I'm only gonna do a smallish number of scientists, and that's a shame, but maybe AI can fill in for us there.

49:53You recommended a book to me, Stalin's Library, which talks about the different things, the different books that Stalin read, and the fact that he was kind of a smart, well -read guy. And the book also mentioned, I think, in the early chapters that look, he never, in all his annotations, if you look through all his books, there's never anything that even hints that he doubted Marxism. That's right. It's a lot of other evidence that that's the correct portrait. What's going, like, smart guy who's read all this literature, all these different things, never even questions Marxism. What's going on there?

50:20What do you think? I think the culture he came out of had a lot of dogmatism to begin with. And I mean both Leninism, which is extremely dogmatic. You know, Lenin was his mentor, like Patrick's thing about the Nobel laureates. It happens in insidious ways too. So Stalin, Lenin is the mentor of Stalin, Soviet culture, communist culture, and then Georgian culture, which appealing and fun -loving, and wine -drinking and dance heavy as it is. There's something about it that's a little, you know, you pound the fist down and you tell people over the table how things are. He had all those stacked vertically, and then we got this badge and had a clock of the draw on Stalin, and it turned out obviously pretty terrible.

51:06And then you buy high -explanation that the reason he rose to the top is just because the most atrocious people win in autocracies. What is that mission missing? I think what Hayek said is subtler than that. And I wouldn't say it's Hayek's explanation. I would say Hayek been pointed one factor. There are quite a few autocracies in the world today where the worst people have not risen to the top. UAE would be, I think, the most obvious example. I've been there. As far as I can tell, they're doing a great job running the country. There are things they do that are nasty and unpleasant. I would be delighted if they could evolve into a democracy.

51:40But the worst people are not running UAE. This I'm quite sure of. So it's a tendency. There are other forces, but culture really matters. Hayek is writing about a very specific place and time. I would say it really surprised me. There are these family -based golf monarchyes with very large, clannish interest groups of thousands of people that have proven more stable and more meritocratic than I ever would have dreamed, say, in 1980. And I know I don't understand it, but I just see it in the data. It's not just UAE. There's a bunch of countries over there that have outperformed my expectations.

52:16And they all have this broadly common system. There's your wonder, when you go around the world, because I know your go -outs have the Bay Area and East Coast as well. And you talk about progress studies related ideas. What's the biggest difference in how they're received versus the audience here? Well, the audience here is so, so different. Like you're the outlier place of America. And then where I normally am, outside of Washington, DC, that's like the other outlier place. And in a way, we're opposite outliers. I think that's healthy for me, both where I live and that I come here a lot and that I travel a lot.

52:52But you all are so like out there in what you believe. I'm not sure where to start. You come pretty close to thinking in terms of infinities on the creative side and the destructive side. And no one in Washington thinks in terms of infinities. They think at the margin. And like overall, I think they're much wiser than the people here. But I also know if everyone or even more people thought like the DC people, like our world would end, we wouldn't have growth. They're terrible. People in the EU are super wise. Like you have a meal with like some sort of French person who works in Brussels. It's very impressive.

53:29They're cultured. They have wonderful taste. They understand all these different countries. They know something about Chinese porcelain. And if like you lived in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%. So there's some way in which all these things have to balance. I think US has done a marvelous job at that. And we need to preserve that. What I see happening, UK used to do a great job at it. UK somehow the balance is out of whack. And you have too many non -growth oriented people in the cultural mix. The way you describe this French person you're having dinner with. Which I find is this is the dinner.

54:05Yeah. And the food is good too. I don't know. It kind of reminds me of you in the sense that you're also well cultured and you all these different esoteric things. I don't know. What's the difference between you and what's like the biggest difference between you and these French people you have dinner with? I don't think I'm well cultured. It would be one difference. There are many differences. First I'm an American. I'm a regional thinker. I'm from New Jersey. So I'm essentially a barbarian, not a cultured person. I have a veneer of culture that comes from having collected a lot of information.

54:34So I'll know more about culture than a lot of people. And that can be mistaken for being well cultured. But it's really quite different. It's like a barbarians approach to culture. It's like a very autistic approach to being cultured and should be seen as such. So I feel the French person is very far and there's something about America they might find strange or repellent. And I'm just so used to it. I see intellectually how many areas we fall flat on are hard destructive. But it doesn't bother me that much because I'm so used to it. What is most misunderstood about autism? Well, if you look at the formal definition, it's all about deficits that people have, right?

55:15Now if you define it that way, like no one here is autistic. If you define it some other way, which maybe we haven't been down yet, like a third of you here are autistic. I don't insist on owning the definition. I think it's a bad word. I would, it's like libertarian. I would gladly give it away. But there is like some coherent definition where a third of you here probably would qualify. And this other definition where none of you would and it's like kids in mental homes banging their head against the wall. So I don't know, seems that whole issue needs this huge reboot. These DC people, one frustration that tech people have is that they have very little influence it seems in Washington compared to how big that industry is.

55:56And the industries that are much smaller will have much greater sway in Washington. Why is tech so bad at having influence in Washington? Well, I think you're getting a lot more influence than maybe you realize quickly through national security reasons. So the feds have not stopped the development of AI, whatever you think they should or should not do. It's basically proceeded. And national security as a lobby that don't care about tech per se. But it is meant that on a whole bunch of things in the future you will get your way a bit more than you might be expecting. But a key problem you have is so much of it is in one area.

56:30And it's also an area where there's a dominant political party. Even within that political party there's in many parts of California a dominant faction. And you compare yourself to like the community bankers who are in like so many American counties have connections to every single person in the House of Representatives. Your issues in O .A. are not very partisan. The distortions you caused through your privileges are invisible to America. It's not like Facebook where some John Hyde has written some best -selling book complaining about what it is you do. There's not a best -selling book complaining about the community banks.

57:06And they are like ruthless and powerful and get their way. And I'm not going to tangle with them. And you all hear are so far from that. In part because you're dynamic and you're clustered. Final question. So I think based on yesterday's session it seems like Patrick's main misgiving with progress is that you look at the younger cohort. There's something that's not going great with them. And it seems to, you know, you would hope that over time progress means that people are getting better and better over time if you buy his view of what's happening with the young people. What's your main misgiving about progress?

57:40The thing you were like, if I look at the times here is data, I'm not sure where this trend is going. Well, our main concern always should be war. And I don't have any grand theory of what causes war such a theory ever is possible. But I do observe in history that when new technologies come along they are turned into instruments of war. And some terrible things happen. You saw this in 17th century England. You saw this with electricity and the machine gun. Nuclear weapons is a story in process. And I'm not sure that's ever going away. So my main concern with progress is progress and war interact.

58:16And it can be in good ways like the world, Alasd even Pinker has had a relative peace. That's fraying at the edges and the data. The numbers are now moving the wrong way. But it's still way better than most past time periods. And we'll have to see where that goes. But there might be a ratchet effect where wars become more destructive and even if they're more rare when they come, each one's a real doozy. And whether we really are or ever can be ready for that, I'm just not sure. And thank you very much, Dorkish. This will be the second session we have done on a pessimistic note. No, the optimistic note is that we're here.

58:48Human agency matters. If we were all sitting around in year 1000 we never could have imagined the world being anything like this, even a much poorer country. And it's up to us to take this extraordinary and valuable heritage and do some more with it. And that's why we're here. So I say let's give it a go. Great note to end up. Thanks, Tyler. I'm very grateful to the Roots of Progress Institute for hosting this progress conference at which I got a chance to chat with Tyler and ask him a few fun questions. Jason Haiky and the whole team did a wonderful job organizing it and it was a blast. And free -think media did a great job with the videography, as you can see.

59:29If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, please like, please share it and send it to your friends who you think might enjoy it. And otherwise, I guess I'll see you on the next one. All right, cheers.