AI and the Collapse of State Power | Miles Taylor

22:53Demetri Kofinas:What do you understand about Mythos' capabilities and what specifically do those capabilities tell us about the national security implications of these models going forward?

23:05Miles Taylor:The real story is both better and worse than what's been portrayed out there. Better in the sense that it seems a little bit like Anthropic might have overstated Mythos' capabilities. You know, a number of independent tests have shown that Mythos is not a step function more sophisticated, but marginally more sophisticated than some of the other models out there. But that margin is just enough to make it cocktail party dangerous when it comes to breaking into supposedly secure systems. So there's that piece. Again, not a step change, but, you know, marginally more sophisticated, enough to create worry.

23:48Miles Taylor:However, what I think Mythos has done is it's really opened the door to us seeing what is meant by the term asymmetric capabilities. We have spent almost 20 years in the national security community talking about this notion of asymmetric capabilities. In other words, at the dawn of the war on terrorism, we were saying how Al-Qaeda had deployed nation-state-like capabilities by turning airplanes into missiles. Only nation-states have missiles. Well, this group of 19 hijackers turned airplanes into missiles. They're getting close to being powerful like a nation-state. That was probably a dramatic overstatement in the time period that individuals were developing nation-state capabilities because at that point in time, it was an extraordinary rarity.

24:40Miles Taylor:Only the smallest groups of dedicated militants could find ways to develop nation-state-like capabilities to launch attacks. Fast forward to 2026, 25 years later, we are now there. And we're now there because almost any individual, not just a handful of groups, almost any individual alive today could, with dedicated time and a limited amount of money, develop nation state-like capabilities in almost every domain. And I mean that with you could develop your own weaponized drone, and that would be a nation-state-like capability. You can create your own missile. You can – we'll talk about bio in a bit.

25:28Miles Taylor:You're on the cusp of being able to do something like that in bio and develop capabilities that only the most powerful nations have had over the past half century. And the most obvious place, though, is in cyber, is individuals now, especially with the development of models like Mythos, can go launch attacks that previously only a handful of nations could launch just a few years ago. And for perspective, I'll mentally take people back to when the Russians meddled in the 2016 election in the United States. According to declassified information, it was about 500 people at the Internet Research Agency that were responsible for that undertaking.

26:12Miles Taylor:I look back at that and I think, that's hilarious. I could orchestrate all by myself using commercial capabilities a very similar operation, one person with one, probably one thousandth of the budget. That is what's changed in just 10 years. Is now an individual is hypothetically capable of taking on election meddling at the scale of a great power? And has it happened yet? I don't know. It's possible we've seen something like that happen in other elections. But that's the scale in which things have changed very, very quickly.

26:49Demetri Kofinas:Now, isn't that just the normal progression of technology in terms of how it reduces limitations to scale? Not just scale, but speed. And so now we're at the place where, as you say, individual actors will eventually have the capabilities to exact the kind of punishment that only nation states could devise.

27:07Miles Taylor:Yes. I don't necessarily think it's inevitable because we have plenty of points in human history where we've seen technological regression into the proverbial dark ages, but it's foreseeable. And it was foreseeable that technology was going to develop along these lines. I think some people might say that AI has developed more quickly than they thought or less quickly. I kind of think that we're on track for some of the projections that we saw in the early 2000s of being in this kind of moment in the 2020s. But here's the real question, Dimitri, which is, if this is happening across the board. We're not just talking about one LLM or one model.

27:46Miles Taylor:We are talking about the extraordinary, unprecedented empowerment of the individual. How do you respond politically to that? I don't mean Democrats and Republicans. I mean, the actual structure of your society. How does a democracy respond to the fact that compared to 100 years ago, an individual has gone from feeling like one little tiny data point in a big society to feeling like their own sovereign, like they are self-sovereign over their existence because they are so powerful. They don't need a centralized broadcast network to give them the news. They don't need a government agency to get them information about nutrition.

28:29Miles Taylor:They don't need centralized postal service to get a message from point A to point B. They need central institutions delivering services less than they've ever needed them. What do you do with that? How do you respond? Because that means any individual can be a god or a devil. And we have an architecture of democracy that's built on centralized services, centralized defense and police forces. I'm not saying we have to answer this in the next one or two years, but genuinely one of the biggest challenges for society in this century will be, how does democracy survive the extraordinary empowerment of the individual?

29:09Miles Taylor:How does it adapt? Because that's going to determine whether people are protected from the downsides. And right now, we haven't even been having that conversation, and it's a conversation that needs to happen in our lifetimes.

29:22Demetri Kofinas:No, I couldn't agree more with you, actually. And that fits to my point before that I was trying to make about how technology and technological innovation changes the limitations to scale. and in so doing, it changes the nature of the relationship between these institutions, whether these are public or private and the individual. We're seeing the same thing with AI and the corporation. I mean, the mode of corporate organization and then the internalization of the economies of scale that derive from it is something that has already been breaking down post-COVID especially with all the gig economy.

29:53Demetri Kofinas:And now with AI, I mean, I see it so much in my own work. What I'm able to do today, and I'm only harnessing a fraction of the capabilities of these systems, but what I'm able to do today essentially replaces, in my case, I didn't actually have these individuals on staff, but if I had producers, I could have replaced them with artificial intelligence. And essentially, Claude is a superior senior producer than any of the people I've ever tried to hire. So, like I said, I'm seeing it firsthand. So, let's continue on. I want to push you on the threat hierarchy here. So when you stack up all the categories that dominate AI and national security conversations, AI enabled cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, AI accelerated bioweapons development, which we just talked about, autonomous lethal weapons systems, synthetic media, which again, we're talking about an information operations and active measures, all of which benefit from AI.

30:49Demetri Kofinas:And AI is just a force multiplier in great power competition, how do you actually rank these threats in terms of imminence, in terms of severity, and our current preparedness to address them? Are bioweapons number one in your view?

31:04Miles Taylor:Number one far and away, and here's what I would say, is my answer ultimately comes down to a really rudimentary metric, which is, do you have a kill switch for it? In the worst case scenario, on any of these threat vectors. Do you have a kill switch? So take autonomy. All right, let's just imagine every self-driving Tesla has been hijacked and they're ramming people into the walls. Okay, your kill switch is Tesla has the ability to just shut down those cars, to pull back the software, or you don't have to get in the car. You don't have to turn it on. You can kill the battery. There's a lot of ways to prevent that from being a problem.

31:47Miles Taylor:Mass cyber attacks. Okay, the answer is not as simple, but let's, in the elementary understanding of this, in the worst case, is there a kill switch for your network? Yeah, there probably is. Is there a kill switch for the internet? Yeah, there probably is, right? You can play that one out to the extremes. In bio, we don't have a kill switch. Someone invents a pathogen. It takes us time, effort, sometimes months, sometimes years to develop the kill switch for the pathogen. That is what makes me worry about bio. Now, on the flip side, I think there is actually a great deal of possibility to be leveraging these same technologies to rapidly diagnose new bio dangers and develop ways to thwart them.

32:37Miles Taylor:But you're still talking about a delivery system that is manual. We're people. We're not interconnected. I, Miles, can't share my immunity with Dimitri over Zoom, at least not right now. And so there's an inherent disadvantage there of adversary versus the target that is going to exist for a long time until we start to develop the architecture to fight biothreats that's really diffuse down to the local level. Here's the thing. In the United States, we're dependent on Health and Human Services, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Center for Disease Control, CDC, to defend us against these dangers and a handful of companies.

33:21Miles Taylor:We're going to be talking about a future that's not too far away where these types of dangerous things can be developed in individual communities. And you're going to need a networked and community approach to fighting back and identifying those dangerous pathogens and responding to them quickly. That's not 40 years out. That's a lot closer than we think. Yet right now, we don't have an architecture like that. Most people listening are in a local community where they have maybe a couple of detectives that go out and investigate robberies at homes. They don't have a local architecture that can identify a novel pathogen and stop it in its tracks and contain it and assess it.

34:00Miles Taylor:But we're going to need to figure out how to have that ability. And we still do have several years here to prepare for that moment. But I mean, it's got to be post 9-11 style, massive attention and spending and bipartisan effort to get us prepared for what's to come.

34:19Demetri Kofinas:Man, that was literally going to be my next question. And it makes so much sense. You know, I could imagine a world where, first of all, governance, and this goes back to, again, the point about technology and how it changes the relationship between institutions and people where governance becomes more distributed or decentralized. Is that how you see things evolving?

34:37Miles Taylor:Yeah. I mean, there was a, I'm blanking on his name. You probably know his name, but the guy who wrote a book a couple of years ago, I didn't read it, but I read about it called The Network State. And the title tells you almost - That's right. The title tells you, I think, mostly what you need to know is, and it seems very logical to adapt to a highly networked society. You're going to need a state that is constructed similarly. And, you know, at the most basic level, that's the ability of people to take their citizenship and take it where they want to. I mean, right now you or I, Dimitri, can join any digital club we want and switch products.

35:18Miles Taylor:And we have total agency in shifting between the associations that we make, with one exception, our polity, is we can't change what society we're a part of. Societies are very calcified, bureaucratic, rigid, and ultimately increasingly unresponsive to the needs of their populations because they're centralized, they're non-networked. That is going to create more and more threats to the individual because fundamentally, Finally, without getting too philosophical, I mean, if we want to go back to the idea of the state of nature and why governments exist, governments exist to protect us from each other.

35:57Miles Taylor:First and foremost, more than anything, in a state of nature, we're out in the wilderness. We form tribes to protect ourselves from each other and from people doing bad things. We don't form them to do single-payer health care. That's not the first priority. The first priority is mutual defense. If a government can't do that anymore, if it cannot protect its citizens, it completely falls apart. Public trust is eviscerated, and then you're on the pathway to societal collapse in a place where the government cannot protect its people. We are going to be in that place in the not-too-distant future when it comes to emerging technology.

36:35Miles Taylor:We're going to be in that place where governments are unable, as they are currently constructed, to protect us. And again, it sounds fanciful right now, but I would project in the 2030s, you're going to see more mainstream conversation around, oh, wow, we need to make some dramatic changes to representative democracy because it's not responsive enough to all of these dangers people are encountering on a regular basis. And, you know, that may sound revolutionary, but also, you know, back yourselves up to 1776. Those are very radical propositions that a group of folks were pushing back then. We need to have some revolutionary conversations to adapt to this new age.

37:18Miles Taylor:And I think it's possible. I think we could get ahead of it. Unfortunately, I don't think enough people will wake up to it until there is some tragic event, which tends to be the course of history.

37:28Demetri Kofinas:I had no idea how far outside the sort of 80 % mainstream you are in terms of how you think and the stuff that this is. No, I think this concept of governance architecture and thinking about it in terms of how it needs to change in order to remain relevant and how it must change and will change as a result, I think it's very interesting. Are there any people that are having these conversations that you follow in particular that you could recommend for people to look up? Anyone producing any interesting research in this area? I mean, you mentioned Balaji, who wrote The Network State. I think some of his ideas have proven to be more durable than I would have predicted.

38:10Demetri Kofinas:It's been, I think, five or six years since he was on the podcast to discuss his framework. So I don't know if my memory can be counted on, but my recollection of his argument was essentially that the secondary, tertiary, et cetera, layers of the stack would dominate and control the base layer. And that specific aspect never made causal sense to me because it's the base layer of the nation state and its executive functions that have not just legal monopoly over the use of force, but escalation dominance. And that base layer is what has secured the entire political economy. But if nation states lose the ability to guarantee the safety of their citizens in any kind of meaningful way, then I think I'd have to rethink the entire concept of a stack as a useful metaphor for thinking about this.

39:00Demetri Kofinas:And so I think what's really interesting then in the context of this conversation is to take biology's framework on the network state and think about how maybe some of these network policies would form, how each node would coordinate and collaborate with each other node, and how this could create larger entities that pool resources and solve collection action problems like security that were previously offloaded to nation states. And so maybe the future ends up looking more confederal than federal. And I realize now, Miles, in mid-train of thought that I asked you if there was anyone else you could recommend that we follow, and I didn't actually let you answer.

39:41Demetri Kofinas:So is there?

39:43Miles Taylor:There isn't. But I also think that, I mean, I'm sure there are out there, but the fact that I can't readily think of folks should be heard by a listener as an indicator of how far behind the eight ball we are in having this conversation. This is not a far futurist conversation. This is a conversation that many of us are going to have to deal with while we are raising our kids. And it's going to come upon us faster than it's come upon any of our ancestors because they had generations to assess the movements of technology and how to adapt society and their political architectures. We will in some cases have years or less to adapt to some of these changes.

40:32Miles Taylor:I'm glad that you said confederalism though, Dimitri, because here's one of the conversations that will make this nearer term and tangible to people. In the next few years, folks are going to hear more interesting conversations around increased federalism in the United States. And here are the early inklings of it. There's a real strange thing happening out there, and you see it in surveys of Americans, which is that folks on the far left who might self-describe as socialists and folks on the far right who might be either MAGA folks in the United States or, like me, small-l libertarians, are both talking about the need for increased state and local autonomy.

41:16Miles Taylor:For the first time ever, you're seeing far ends of the political spectrum, at least in modern times, both saying they want powers from the federal government devolved more to the state and local level. That used to be something that was anathema to people on the political left because a lot of the things that they wanted to do collectively required a strong central government. Now, you're seeing a lot of those same people who wanted a hyper-empowered Barack Obama or Joe Biden say, oh, no, I don't like that much power in the hands of the federal government when someone I don't like, such as a Donald Trump, is in office.

41:53Miles Taylor:Maybe this is better if my blue state had those powers. And there's something very interesting there because a lot of Republicans or small C conservatives have fought for a long time for a more federalist architecture. This plays into the bigger picture of what you and I were talking about, Dimitri, is people trending towards a desire for a closer polity, a networked state that's more responsive to them. And federalism is the sort of elementary version of that. The more you devolve power closer to the people, the more responsive it is to them. That's a step towards something like a network state.

42:33Miles Taylor:You're going to see a desire in the next few years of blue states and red states in the United States to take some of those powers back from the federal government as a way to diffuse tensions in this country. And I also think that that creates new opportunities for self-selection. In other words, to create competition again in a democracy. You'll have a California competing with a Texas and saying, hey, live here because here's what your social benefit package will look like. Here's what your tax package will look like. And that creates a competition among states and breathes new life into democracy.

43:07Miles Taylor:That's a conversation that's going to be evolving over the course of the next decade instead of some of the stuff you and I were talking about on the 20, 30, or 40-year time horizon. And I'm already seeing the early inklings of that coming from actual politicos, elected members of Congress and other folks saying, we got to think about when this Trump administration's over, what some of the big political reforms are to turn down the temperature between the two sides.

43:29Demetri Kofinas:So I love where this conversation is going, and it was not scripted. To go back to what I said earlier about the challenges to devolving power and to confederalism, this is also one of the concerns that made the articles of confederation unworkable. Besides the lack of a central authority to tax and to regulate interstate commerce and enforce laws. And it was also one of the concerns that Abraham Lincoln had about Southern secession, specifically that a major European power like Britain or France might enter into an alliance with or enter closer relations with the Confederacy and ultimately threaten the viability of the union and the entire American project.

44:07Demetri Kofinas:And so where I'm going with this is essentially to point out that as we've established, we're living in this world where technology reduces the limitations to scale and the speed at which events occur that need to be responded to so that eventually a single actor, a single node has the ability to destroy the entire network. And at the same time, traditional great powers are more powerful than ever in absolute terms. And therefore, conventional threats pose a real danger to a nation's people. Is your contention that individual nodes or actors acting alone or in smaller groups represent a bigger long-term threat than nation states?

44:49Demetri Kofinas:Or is a nation like China still the long-term primary adversary and threat to the people of the United States? And if we have to risk a terrorist attack or a lone wolf attack or whatever you want to call them, that this is just the price we have to pay to protect ourselves from these more formidable adversaries.

45:11Miles Taylor:There's going to be a lot of caveats to this answer. Let's say you can control for warfare, nuclear conflict, the big things that a great power at this point can inflict upon another great power. If we assume that there's no spiraling conflict with China that could get us into a nuclear exchange, then I would say that the graver threat to stability from a national security standpoint comes from within than the outside. And not just in the United States. I mean, I think that's everywhere. That would apply to China as well because of this underlying force. I mean, I know this all sounds very philosophical, but it translates directly into the security challenges we see.

45:55Miles Taylor:That wasn't the case 30 years ago. 30 years ago, you would not have to worry about the ability inside of a country, in most countries, of people to organize rapidly to upend the power structure in that country. We're trending towards a future where we need to worry a lot more about folks being able to militarize themselves online and across borders into a unit challenging the state than we do a whole other state going to war with us because it's going to be more frequent. It's going to be more likely. There's going to be more incentives in that direction. And this, Dimitri, is what creates the tension, is as that starts to happen all around the world, but we'll keep using the United States as an example, it will be derided, perhaps rightfully, as in some cases rebel movements, terrorist movements, militia movements.

46:46Miles Taylor:It will be met with state power to suppress it. To some people, that state power will look like authoritarianism. There is a reason why Freedom House, which has been the organization tracking the trends of political freedom around the world, has been observing multi-year declines in freedom around the world. Why? Because governments are trying to reassert themselves in the face of sovereign, self-sovereign movements of people challenging their authority. This looks different in a lot of places. In some countries, it's a straight-up obvious terrorist movement that's trying to oppress the population and take over.

47:23Miles Taylor:government. In other places, we may look at it like a legitimate rebellion to overthrow an authoritarian regime. It's going to have different faces. But this structure, if we're just looking at the world as a petri dish, is lots of little tiny nodes trying to connect within countries to take control over their destiny and states resisting that change. You will see more civil conflict in the 21st century because of this. And I think less great power conflict because more and more countries are going to be facing this internal pressure and grappling with what it means. And it's going to have different outcomes too.

47:59Miles Taylor:Some countries are going to adapt and further democratize and reform their democracies, and it will release the pressure. Other countries will not, and they will slide backwards into autocracy and potentially be overthrown. So let me paint a picture for people. This doesn't have a uniform outcome. As these pressures that Dimitri and I have been talking about, most of them driven by technology, increase, you can see outcomes that are feudal outcomes and outcomes that are futurist outcomes. What do I mean by that? Well, in some places, that may sound and look a lot like the Dark Ages. And in others, it may sound and look a lot like a new renaissance.

48:38Miles Taylor:Because to your point, Dimitri, ultimately the state is responsible for security. So when these structures fall apart, people will say, who's going to protect me? In some places, that may look like roving bands of modern warlords and militias trying to protect folks. That's the Dark Ages frame. In other places, the new Renaissance frame is kind of what we were talking about before, a version of the network state is, yeah, we've devolved powers of federalism down to more localities. And blue states or blue localities and red ones have more agency, and they're also taking on more of those responsibilities of security.

49:11Miles Taylor:And there's a reason why confederalism failed in the early days of the American Republic is because none of these states could provide the security of a large federal government. That has changed now because the individual is able to exert so much more power than they were before. Think of my answer with drones. Now, we're a couple of years out from any individual with just enough cash, being able to develop their own micro air force. I mean, you're going to be able to have your own drone swarms. Now, hopefully we're regulating that in a way that protects the population, but that's the type of thing that we're talking about here.

49:44Miles Taylor:And I'm not saying any of these things normatively. This isn't really the future I'm excited about. I'd love to go back 100 years and be like, all right, great, semi-stable polity. Let's focus on some other issues. But this is coming for us whether we like it or not, and we're going to choose. Do we want that futurist approach? Do we want the feudal approach? And that is going to be testing every country around the world in the coming decades.

50:05Demetri Kofinas:I feel like there might be some lessons here or some parallels to draw between the world we're moving into and Europe between the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, specifically the rise of these nationalist movements that posed existential threats to those empires and to the existing monarchies of Europe who were at the same time a threat to each other in this kind of three-body problem. So just to cap off this part of our discussion, Miles, about the relationship between prioritizing great power rivalry versus non-state or lone wolf style threats.

50:42Demetri Kofinas:Do you feel like governments should be doing more to collaborate and pursue something equivalent to arms control measures in order to strike a balance between these types of threats? Or do you fall in the category of someone like, say, Chris McGuire, who believes that any attempt at arms control should be a secondary priority to maintaining US technological dominance and doesn't really believe that China would be willing to engage in good faith anyway. You know, it's referred to as a wicked problem in game theory.

51:13Miles Taylor:It's a wicked problem. Indeed, I sort of wish some of the fathers of game theory had survived a little bit longer because they were on the cusp of playing with some of these challenges, like the John von Neumanns of the world who helped invent game theory. They died while they were just on the cusp of playing with ideas about artificial intelligence and what it was going to mean for solving collective dilemmas. So here we are. Dimitri, it's over to you and I to figure that out. Oh, wow. Good luck, world. Humanities. Good luck, world.

51:45Demetri Kofinas:Jesus Christ. We're toast.

51:47Miles Taylor:Look, if we're going to try to draw lessons from history on how to do this, it's basically you have to create new power centers that align with the threat. Here's what I mean by that. If we wanted to – this ties back to our previous conversation as well. If we wanted to break down history into really big digestible buckets, you would see that we had an era of, let's call it 2 ,000 years that was like the period of empires. Then after that, you have a smaller period of time that was the period of monarchies and then the development of nation states. And then you had a period after that of a period of democracies.

52:34Miles Taylor:And about 100 years or so were those democracies further shrunk down into a little bit more stable representative democracies. You basically have the devolution of legitimacy going from these huge, huge empires to smaller monarchies to nation states to representative democracies. It's a general trend we're seeing in history. So if we are indeed continuing to trend that direction to a smaller level frame of networked threats, you also have to start thinking about it being met with a networked response. This answers your question, Dimitri, because if we are confronting the threats of tomorrow by using the arms control frames of the last century, we're totally mismatched.

53:20Miles Taylor:We're saying let's find a nation state solution between China and America to a problem that's now devolved to the network level. That goes back to the water through rocks framing from before. And we sort of lived a micro version of this debate here in Washington, D.C. about a decade ago. So I was very, very involved in the debates about encryption. And folks might remember, regardless of what your political opinions are of James Comey, James Comey was FBI director. And there was a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. And they could not get into the ISIS operatives iPhone. Why? Because it was encrypted.

54:02Miles Taylor:And Apple was using not full end-to-end encryption. But anyway, the device itself was encrypted and the FBI had trouble getting into it. And there was this huge debate about whether the federal government should pass laws requiring technology companies to have a backdoor into encrypted systems. And this was not a, you know, 90-10 debate. At the time, it was like a 50-50 debate in Washington. Like half of members of Congress, Democrat or Republican said, hell no, we need to have the most secure digital architecture for the future. We should have unbreakable encryption possible for anyone, even if that means the government can't get in.

54:45Miles Taylor:And then you had national security folks on the other side saying this is a huge threat. If we can't get into the phones of criminals and terrorists, then what function does the government get to perform anymore? Well, I'll tell you how that debate ended. It didn't end with some decision that was made. It was just that people really wanted to be able to encrypt their devices, whether it was against the government or against a bad guy trying to get in. And we trended in the direction of unbreakable encryption. Now it's a foregone conclusion. Now it's a 90-10 debate. As no one in Washington is arguing for backdoors into this technology.

55:19Miles Taylor:We realize how important it is to have our sensitive information encrypted. Now we're seeing new vulnerabilities come along. My point being there was no big arms control solution to that because there couldn't be. Because even if the government had mandated backdoors, guess what? Everyone would have just bought products from some other country that allowed them to fully encrypt their data and fully encrypt their devices. There was no state-level solution. That's why Congress couldn't reach agreement on it, is it wasn't even possible for Congress to pass a law and enforce a law on encryption because the power had devolved to a lower level, to a network level that the state could not stop.

55:58Miles Taylor:That is where we're at on AI. There is not. I'm going to tell people right now. It's a bet I could put my limited assets against in their entirety. The US government, the Chinese Communist Party, these major governments cannot and will not reach some big global accord, some arms control accord on emerging technology that has any sort of durable impact on controlling those technologies. They don't have the ability to. It's not doable at that frame. So all you can do is start to develop the more devolved local and network capabilities to defend against emerging technology. And that's something that we're in the very early innings of thinking through.

56:41Miles Taylor:And just a final note, to attach a practical frame on it for people, what might that look like? What it might look like is pick something like a mythos. If your everyday person is able to deploy agentic cyber capabilities to go attack your infrastructure, you're probably going to have to have your own ability to do intelligent, agentic, active defense of your networks, potentially to include hackback capabilities of the adversary to actively neutralize their agents coming after yours. That's something that we're not really used to thinking about, right? If a robber breaks into your home, you're calling 911 to guard against the robber.

57:23Miles Taylor:We don't tell every citizen you all must be able to defend yourselves for the first five to 10 minutes until law enforcement gets there. But at least in the cyber domain, we're going that direction. You can't count on cyber 911 to come protect you in these moments. So that's a way to think about it. But that's the way we're headed. We can't depend on major arms control agreements on emerging tech to protect us.

57:45Demetri Kofinas:Man, you're blowing my mind right now. I remember the San Bernardino shooter. And in fact, I did an episode. I published, I think my only monologue ever in 2017 titled Machine Intelligence, Encryption, and the Will to Power. and that was one of the stories that I referenced. And I might've even pulled the sot of Obama speaking about it, or maybe it was Obama at some conference in Europe talking about how a cell phone is a Swiss bank in everybody's pocket and how do we deal with this? And what a blast from the past because back then we had the luxury of time, or at least we perceived that we did.

58:26Demetri Kofinas:We could sit around here and have these philosophical Jeffersonian debates about privacy versus security. And that world is so far gone. And as you say, we're kind of at the mercy of events at this point. And what you've sketched out here is, I think, a conversation that I haven't really heard anyone else talking about. So let's dig into this more in the second hour, Miles. I want to dig into governance frameworks and how the role of what we traditionally think of as the public sector for a wide variety of things, from social services like education to research and development and what we traditionally think of as industrial policy will have to change and what might replace those services and policies.

59:07Demetri Kofinas:I'd also like to have a discussion about synthetic media. This is something that I'm very interested in, deep fakes and active measures and how AI used in the context of our internet media platforms and social media networks makes our ability to tell unifying narratives about hundreds of millions of people more difficult and how that impacts both the viability of the nation state and the function of the market economy. And finally, what can actually be done to mitigate some of the fallout? What are some of the practical policy proposals, in other words, that you would like to see implemented and how do we get there?

59:43Demetri Kofinas:For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Miles, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Miles, stick around. We're going to move the second hour of our conversation onto the premium feed.

1:00:21Demetri Kofinas:If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stigliano Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.