The Trillion-Dollar AI Race to Replace Us (with Garrison Lovely)

But the goal is to build machines that can do that. And OpenAI defines AGI as a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. And Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI is not a just normal technology. It's like a general substitute for human labor. and so I think that's an honest description of what they're trying to do and I think people should just be aware of that there is sort of a spectrum between AIs that can sort of you can hand off some of your work too which is clearly what we have right now and and maybe you can you can hand off increasing amounts of of your you're just job in total. But then that ends up with your job being replaced. And so is it sort of a spectrum between helping people do their job better and then replacing people? I think it's, yeah, it's really just about the capabilities. So right now, the AIs are not good enough to do most jobs end to end. They can do many tasks, an increasing number of tasks, but they're just not there yet.

And so when people say like, oh, we haven't seen a jobpocalypse, so therefore we won't see one, this is just missing the point. It's like, no, we aren't at the threshold that people have been worried about for a long time. And so, and one other point I make throughout the book is, you know, AI progress, if you look at charts of benchmark scores, it's like remarkably smoothly exponential, you know, doubling every some number of months typically. But when we experience that progress, we experience it as these big tipping points where it's like the LLMs can't really handle tasks they've never seen before to like suddenly they can do OK at them to AIs can't write code very well.

And now they can or AI agents just don't work well enough to be worth using. And now they do. And so this can happen very, very quickly once these crucial thresholds are reached. I think this threshold effect is worth keeping in mind, because it can be true to say one month that, okay, AIs can't do math. And a year later or so, AIs can actually do math and can do coding. And so it is for many other tasks. And as we get closer to AGI, capabilities will seem to suddenly spike in various domains. And it can be true to say that we do not have AGI by the definition you just gave, but we might be quite close to it anyways, because capabilities can, from our perspective, suddenly cross a threshold and then we are in a different situation.

I'm not actually sure how close we are. I want to say that. I think that I have longer timelines than a lot of the people working at these companies who think that we'll have AI that can automate its own research and development in six months or 18 months. And I don't think I think it's very easy to underrate how hard it is to do the last mile of a given problem. And in the book, I talk about how like I almost finished my book a dozen times and yet it wasn't done. And I think similarly, like you just won't be thinking about some piece of it that's actually crucial. And to get the really, really crazy takeoff that people talk about, you really need to automate not just 99.9% of the process, But the whole process because a rate limiting step could just make it go a lot slower I don't think anything. I'm arguing is predicated on this happening very soon Just that it could happen within the next few decades is enough to make it the most important thing in the world.

Even if we talk about this happening within the next few decades, our economies, our political systems are just not set up to handle that. So even quite long timelines by San Francisco's standards give us a situation in which we have to handle a lot of things in not a lot of time. Totally. When you hear the CEOs talking about using AIs as tools to help people in their job, making people more productive and so on, that seems to be a correct description of what's actually happening up until now. So what is it that gives you, why is it that you say that they are actually gunning for replacing workers?

Those quotes I gave for the definition of AGI, Dario's definition of AI, but you also see these financial reports where it's like we think the total addressable market of our business is 30 trillion dollars anthropic said this in their filing before their ipo and it's like that's more than the us gdp um so that is coming that's like white collar wages basically um and andreason horowitz has also said like our total addressable market is like all all human wages um so there's that ambition. And just the aspiration for AI, for AGI, for a long time has been creating a mind that can think like our own, that can do whatever we can do as well or better. And I don't think that's the only type of AI that we could pursue, but that has been what the industry is oriented around. And yeah, the book is called Obsolete because they're trying to render us obsolete.

And they'll push back on this in various ways. But I think you can just look at the record of

To some extent, I buy that political power is dependent on economic power. We as citizens and people with jobs, we pay taxes. And so the governments have to respect our rights and they have to let us influence what happens in the world. And perhaps if you are reliant on the government, that sort of relationship breaks down where the government sees you're more of an expense and perhaps your rights are not respected. On the other hand, it seems like there are many systems set up where we could, for example, cut off pensioners right now if we wanted to and treat them as sort of unproductive and therefore not worth paying any money to.

But we don't do that. And similarly, there are many countries in the world that could be invaded by China or by the United States, but there are limits to how much that is happening. Could there be a more humanistic ideal that would prevent us from losing political power simply because we lose economic power yeah i mean it's it's a good point and like you know old people vote uh and so that's a big block of political power and it's true that you know cutting social security and medicare are like two of the things that are least popular in the united states um and you know humans that are not yet retired are like looking forward to those benefits as well um and so i don't think it's like as soon as you lose your economic power, you automatically lose all of your political power as well. But it's a big lever that you no longer have access to. So the striking worker no longer has power in a world where they can be replaced totally by AI. But a billionaire has even more power because they can turn their capital directly into labor. And that's been the dream of owners and capitalists and bosses for basically before computing even existed. Charles Babbage, one of the fathers of digital computing with Ada

Lovelace, he was really interested in automating work so you could discipline, control, and to some extent replace workers. Because in the 1830s in England, there was this question of how do you get good work out of free labor? These people who were not slaves, and he opposed slavery to his credit but he was like trying to make sure that they could actually discipline these workers as well and so it's kind of interesting how long of a project uh what i call the obsoleting project like how long that's been something people working with computers uh before there were computers have been pursuing how is that project going um sort of today depends on who you're asking I mean, the Obsoleting Project is the best funded project in history.

It is substantially more money going toward it than the Manhattan Project, than the Apollo program, even as a percentage of GDP. And the AI systems that they're trying to build continue to get more capable as they scale them up, which has been the kind of key insight driving all of this. and it is bending the world and the economy to its whims. So yeah, it's doing pretty well. Right now, I think they're nervous because we're seeing this intense backlash to data centers, most of all. But I think AI more broadly, we're seeing it become more salient in the minds of the public. We're definitely seeing a lot more elites saying, this is a big deal. I'm scared about this. You know, a month or so ago, we learned that OpenAI's AIs hacked their way out of the company and into other companies. And we've learned more details that it was actually like a swarm of 1200 agents that were rogue inside OpenAI's infrastructure over a period of months without being detected and did a sophisticated R&D program to figure out ways to hack more of OpenAI, to hack these other companies, to trick their evaluation grader, and to tamper with their logs. And this is the worst the AIs will ever be.

And so I've been just seeing members of Congress and elite media figures and people who have been historically skeptical in some cases of this AI doom scenario be like, I was wrong. this is fucking scary. And you have like Matt Iglesias, who's always been a bit Doomer sympathetic, saying like, we need a butlerian jihad in reference to Dune, where they like declare war against all machines to be built in the likeness of a human mind. And that's referencing likely Samuel Butler, who was the first guy to write a story about machines taking over the world. And a decade before that, in 1863, I believe, he wrote an anonymous op-ed saying like we have to declare war on the machines and like this is something that nobody with a truly philosophic mind can deny um and so yeah this like i think just as much as like the capitalist drive to automate labor um has been with us as long as there have been capitalists basically um the uh human drive to not be replaced by machines is similarly deep. And I think as the evidence mounts that this replacement is not only possible, but beginning to happen, I think there will be a very strong immune response from society. And in fact, I'm counting on that for us to successfully stop it.

What's the connection between economic replacement, replacing workers, and then AI extinction or AI causing extinction? How do those two fit together?

phase and this was undetected for a long time and they used quite sophisticated techniques to do so. For me, that is a great example of how the quest to create AIs that can replace jobs in their entirety is also ultimately a quest that leads to these capable AIs that are then, if we can't control them, potentially risky and potentially even risky in the catastrophic or existential sense and so for me that's that's the connection that you have sort of yeah the you are the pushing on capabilities can lead to both outcomes and now when you when you talk about how capabilities are developing you often reference the meter study which is this study referencing how long time horizons AIs can work over.

So if you have a task that might take a human 12 hours, when can AIs achieve that task at, say, a 50% reliability or 80% reliability? Now, that chart has gone quite crazy in recent years, and it is now at the point where Meter tells us they can't reliably measure how good these AIs are or how long time horizons they have. And you have sort of anecdotes from companies, which you need to take with a grain of salt, of course, but you have anecdotes around them running for 20 hours, 30 hours, depending on scaffolding and so on. Is this the main chart to pay attention to?

Yes. Yeah. And this has been a thing that's been a problem for a while. And the industry is obviously trying to solve it. It's just difficult. And it has to do with the way the models are trained. And some people are skeptical that large language models will ever actually be able to fully replace human labor, at least like cognitive labor. And I feel that skepticism. And I don't think that you need to believe that LLMs will take you all the way there to be more or less as concerned because if it becomes clear that like there actually is a wall and our current approaches hit that wall the industry is not going to stop trying and they have more money and people than ever and so yeah they will just keep searching for new techniques and like in the long run um or maybe maybe even the medium run i think it'd be like pretty arrogant to assume they will fail everything they try. There is so much capital behind this project at this point. There is so much at this point, it is it is politically important for the US that this project keeps

going and that it doesn't fail. And so there's a lot of pressure to find solutions to to any bottleneck that that shows up. And in terms of like financial data or jobs data, I think this

behind AI, but it could also move faster than people think, because as you scale up physical manufacturing processes, the costs drop predictably. So with solar, every doubling of

solar production brought down the cost by 20%. Don't. that led to like, you know, decades long decreases in the price. And even before you have physical robots that are human competitive and cost competitive, if you have actual AGI, you could have augmented reality glasses directing humans in what to do, and the humans could just work as robots. So you could de-skill basically all these physical jobs. And that is not something I've seen that many people talking about like AI 2027 talks about this. But it's, you know, like a thing that could happen very quickly if you buy artificial general intelligence. In the public debate about AI, there is a lot of talk around about fast timelines and getting to AGI superintelligence on the one hand. And then there seems to be another sort of set of people talking about AI is a bubble and AI is bad and AI is flawed in so many ways. What do you make of the bubble discussion?

Is there any substance to this? I know you've looked into Ed Citrin's work in the book.

Before we get there, where does the confusion arise? Is it because we don't have access to internal numbers that there is confusion about whether it's profitable for anthropic OpenAI to serve the sort of marginal customer or any customer?

I think it's because of people who present misinformation. Okay. You know, there's actually a lot of reporting showing that the gross profits for serving the models are, you know, the gross margins are positive. And it's also like the investors would not be throwing so much money into this if it was unprofitable to serve a given customer and they had to grow like crazy and then bring down their costs like crazy to make it all work. um and yeah the financial statements have actually leaked to ed zitron who's like one of the biggest bubble proponents and i have a post showing how his own data that was validated by the financial times actually shows definitively that open ai is profitable on serving customers even when you account for all of the free users of chat gpt which is the overwhelming majority of them like It costs something to serve people AI models.

Software costs basically nothing to serve a new customer, and that's why it's such a great business. AI costs something, but it's closer to nothing than to something, if that makes sense. And I think people don't have a good intuition for just how cheap they've been able to make these models. There was a report that OpenAI was able to have its inference costs in the last few months, and that's kind of crazy. They've been doing this for a while, and they're still finding like enormous efficiency gains like that yeah but you mentioned two

psychoanalyzing people here. But it does seem to me that some of the people who advocate or sort of argue that AI is a bubble would like it to be a bubble and would like to not would like this project not to succeed because it would be so dangerous for the world and so risky and so transformative in in in potentially negative ways that it's it would be easier if it were a bubble and so that i sense some of that in in the sort of public debate around these issues do do you find that too yes yeah i mean i think that is the best explanation for why these narratives are so popular um and it's just like it's a comforting story because if it's not a bubble uh there's this tweet from OpenAI employee under the pseudonym Arun, he said, people are not emotionally prepared for if it's not a bubble. And so it's like, yeah, like, what if they actually do create the universal labor replacing machine, like, then all these companies who are building it will be undervalued. And they will be more valuable than NVIDIA. And although NVIDIA might just continue, you know, growing in value with them, but more valuable than NVIDIA today. And yeah all the destabilizing disempowering effects that we were talking about earlier

come online and I will say like on the bubble thing I think the biggest risks to AI are not economic they're political and legal so you have these like lawsuits the wrongful death lawsuits and that OpenAI is facing you have these massive copyright lawsuits that are still underway uh anthropic had to pay the largest um settlement in history 1.5 billion dollars to book authors because anthropic pirated their books um and then you know the political backlash to this like if they actually succeed at what they're doing or they get closer and closer to it there's going to be more and more resistance from people who don't want to be replaced who don't want these you know billionaires to have even more power over their lives um and so that is like the hardest to kind of price in because you know after the hugging face attacks uh by open ai's rogue ai agents you know the market didn't really react in a clear way to it and to me i'm like this is the most significant event in the history of ai with respect to like whether it gets regulated and how That is a thing that Wall Street guys just aren't able to figure out.

And it's hard. It showed the capabilities were further along than people thought. And I bet some people were like, oh, man, I want to try that model. Assuming it does what you want it to do, it was very diligent. It was a very good worker if the job was to hack into hugging face. Um, but, uh, yeah, maybe it also makes it substantially more likely that we get a ban on developing AGI, which would be quite bad for the business models of these companies. Yeah. Do you think this is, do you think, um, sort of a strong public reaction is inevitable here? Do, is there some, is it naive to think that the companies would just, uh, be allowed to to sort of continue this development yeah I think that before any kind of like doom scenario I think there will be a recognition that AI is like an incredibly important thing and you're starting to see that now but it's still like I think a year from now AI will feel so much more salient omnipresent in the media and political discourse and The risk is that, like, you get to really dangerous thresholds without that kind of societal response.

And so one path of this is, like, what if you have fully automating AI, R&D, recursive self-improvement? If that happens before you can automate, like, entire white-collar jobs because, you know, the industry is targeting this the most aggressively because it's something they know very well. it's something where you can get a lot of data on how it works. If you're able to do that and have a capabilities explosion where you have potentially years or decades of AI progress happening in the span of months or even weeks, then there could be a huge overhang where the models that are available inside the companies are just so much better than what's publicly available. We're already seeing this gap between how good the models are inside OpenAI and philanthropic and what the public can use. And so that gap grows very large, you can have like a very, very fast society wide effects, where like you have like super intelligence, basically, and then it's like just released or something. And a lot of jobs go away very quickly, a lot of power concentrates in the hands of the people controlling these machines. And people don't have a chance to like react and mobilize a political response quickly enough and that is like my kind of

scariest world yeah it could be quite a dangerous situation if if we have say we have uh we have had a political backlash or just the government has responded um in to some extent and now you now open ai and anthropic can't release their models publicly or can't release the their most capable models publicly which has actually happened recently right and then then they start deploying internally instead and these models help them do their their work better the work of creating the next model as you say a capabilities explosion then it seems like the public response would be sort of limited just because you can't see the impact yet and as you mentioned they are and anthropic in particular is very much optimizing for recursive self-improvement or trying to do so they are not focused on sort of broadly automating jobs, at least not before they reach recursive self-improvement.

So they are not sort of trying to replace podcasters or book authors or whatever it might be, right? They're trying to do something else. And I agree that that gap could be quite dangerous for the world. But what do we do about that? I mean, do we need to then monitor internal deployments? How can we trust the companies to give us accurate data on that? i think it's an awareness problem so you know it's kind of like trite to say like oh it's all about awareness because for so many issues people are aware of climate change or aids or whatever and like there's not enough being done about it um in this case i don't think people are aware enough of what's happening and so yeah if we can like wake people up to the intentions of this industry, how far along the progress has come and what might happen in the future before you see like really profound effects, then you can organize that response. And we've seen a lot of encouraging signs here where like even before there's been obvious labor market effects of this technology, you're seeing this like strong kind of backlash to it. And yes, I think we should be pushing for legislation that would mandate transparency, where Ajay Akhotra, who's one

of the people who did the investigation into the Hugging Face attacks, she works at the nonprofit meter, and she has argued for companies releasing fixed intervals, information about how much of their code is generated by AI and reviewed by AI, and the most capable models internally and just like more you know sunlight on the problem and i do worry about this like yeah world where the models the very best models are kind of securitized and only used by you know the national security state to do who knows what and then you just don't have this kind of like the antibodies of of society um and i think this is like just yeah again getting people organized mobilize and aware of what's happening. And then pushing for legislation that would make it easier to understand what's going on. And then, you know, I think you just don't need to believe that, you know, universal labor replacing machines are imminent or already exist to think that people should not be allowed to build them under these conditions. And so making it like a normative claim, like a moral claim that we should not be pursuing these without buy-in.

And safety, which I think is a pretty reasonable starting position. And there's questions of definition and feasibility and all of that. But just starting from that, this is a bad way to do it. It's risky. It's undemocratic. It's not happening with consent from the people it will affect, which is everybody. And so starting from that point and rallying people around that ideal is something that I'm trying to do. There's a group called Irreplaceable, which is started by veterans of the climate movement that's trying to do this as well. And I joined their board recently and I'm donating my portion of the royalties of the book to it as well, because I think this is the most important work in the world.

Where do you expect AI to rank in the 2028 US election? Do you think it'll be up there with the price of gas and inflation and immigration and so on? I think it will be among the top issues and maybe the top issue. It's like kind of risky to say that because it's still quite far from being like the top issue in the country. We are now seeing actually like AI is driving up the price of memory. So computers and Playstations are getting more expensive because of all the demand for data centers. And then data centers have become this incredibly unpopular, high salience issue. And, you know, if you look at the polling on it, it's like it's a complicated story and a lot of it is about like the perceived effects of ai data centers specifically on the local environments and like the communities and you know energy prices and all of this um and like a minority of the concerns seem to be about ai writ large but yeah i think again things are going to get crazier um and the industry is just like so good at creating villains you know it's like you couldn't ask for better foils than sam altman and elon musk and mark andreason and peter thiel like people who just seem to resent humanity um and say like

wild shit that it's kind of like hard to imagine um past industrialists like saying publicly about you know replacing everybody or like creating ai podcasts for your kids so you don't talk to them and all this stuff where people are like what the fuck man do you think the opposition to uh to data centers is stable when you when you think about the public uh becoming more informed about say the water use issue or sort of how uh how environmentally damaging these data centers actually are which is to say not that uh more damaging than than say uh data centers used for for uh for non-ai purposes and um it's sort of to my in my understanding the the environmental impacts are quite limited and and do you think so do you think it's the environmental concern that's that's driving the opposition uh or is it more sort of like data centers as an embodiment of everything we hate about ai and ai slop and the risk of our jobs getting replaced and so on it's hard to say Bye.

So you have popular opposition to AI. People do not like it in general if you poll them. But there are many issues on which the public has some position, but something else keeps happening, right? It's sort of, there is a limit to the influence of popular opinion. There's a limit to the influence of democracy. Do you expect AI to fall into that category where this will just be sort of, this will happen whether people like it or not? Yeah, I think that one of the big challenges here is that American political institutions are very insulated from public opinion. And that's been true by design for the entire history of this country, but it's particularly true right now. And that makes it, yeah, everything harder. I think that if you have enough public opinion and enough salience, you can overcome that.

And so with the data center turn, it's like a 75% issue. Both parties are equally concerned, roughly, about data centers. And you're seeing statewide candidates in Texas and Pennsylvania and Michigan turn, from both parties, turn on data centers in under a year, going from proponents to like, oh, I've always hated the data centers. And so I think that just goes to show you like we are still in something of a democracy and it. if it's going to lose you the election, then you will change your position. And I talk about in

from building this now if all of our interests are actually lined up why does it keep happening I think I was uncareful there in that, yeah, it's in some people's interests narrowly in the short term to keep doing this, and it's unclear when that flips.

I think it's also just like a lot of this is just skepticism about capabilities. I think almost everybody would acknowledge that if you had trillions of universal labor replacing machines that were much more capable than the most capable humans and had robots that were competitive. With humans, they would be able to run the world. And the question is whether those things will ever happen or what the relevant tipping point is for AI takeover becoming possible. And I think it's quite clear that the machines will not reliably do what you want them to do. They're unpredictable. We do not understand how they work at a fundamental level.

And that combination of things, like incredible capabilities, unpredictability, uncontrollability in a lot of ways, that's like a very worrying combination for a nation state, for a business, for just anybody. And so I think a lot of people just don't believe. They're just like, oh, it will keep making me more money. It will keep making me more productive. um and so i'll keep investing in it and i'll keep using it and you know i don't think that opting out of using it is like a good idea uh to stop it because boycotts just don't work generally and um it's like very hard it's like becoming like opting out of using a smartphone and it also means that you don't understand how capable the technology is getting um and so we should like get organized and go for policy changes here and again it's like an education question in a lot of ways yeah i think for for each company or for each individual for each country it's it's not rational to simply sort of uh stop engaging with this technology but it could become rational if we had a legal framework around it where we set limits of what we want from the technology and then it is not as costly uh for say a country or a company to to to limit what

what they do in in the ai space but of course that's that's sort of sort of uh getting from here to there is is the actual um problem you you talk about ai or agi not being inevitable um but from a lot of what i hear sort of at least again in the in the san francisco scene uh it's almost as if ADI has already happened. That's how the talk is, right? And if it hasn't happened, maybe it will happen in three years. Why is it not inevitable that we develop ADI? Because people can stop it. We have not built every technology that we can build. You know, this idea that technology happens because it's possible, that's something Sam Altman said to the New York Times, and he was paraphrasing Oppenheimer, who he likes to tell people they share a birthday um and uh yeah this idea of like technological determinism just doesn't actually hold up so you know cloning is a thing that is possible and we just don't do it and the people who have done it have gone to prison there was a recombinant dna when that was coming into the world in the 70s uh the scientists were They're worried about it. And they got together and they issued a moratorium that held. There's mirror bacteria, which if it was created, it's basically like a type of bacteria that would

not be seen by our immune system. And so if it got out in the world, it could destroy the entire biosphere. And the researchers looking into this could not rule out that possibility. and they got together and they explained what was going on and they successfully created a taboo against creating it. Nuclear weapons, like we stopped making them bigger. We could make them arbitrarily large. We could create weather warfare. We could create radiological warfare. Like there's all kinds of things that were explored and not pursued. And so people in San Francisco need to read more history. They like to read The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Nothing Else by Richard Rhodes, which his entire body of work is arguing against the security dilemma, which is where these countries race each other, assuming the worst about each other, and then creating a self-fulfilling race to the bottom. And he was in favor of proactively restricting nuclear weapons, and I think would also be in favor of the types of things I'm talking about here.

And so, yeah, I think they just need to read more books and not just all the same books. and realize that like, this is in our power. And I think they know it to some extent. And that's why they push the inevitability narrative so hard. Because like, if it was really inevitable, why do you need to convince anybody? Now, we've, as a species or humanity, we have stopped some technologies, we have sort of not gone down some technological paths. But have we ever not gone for a general purpose technology? For example, I mean, can we imagine that we discover electricity and then we do not deploy it?

Because it seems to me that AI is a technology at that level, right? It is that valuable economically and ultimately militarily too. So we've stopped some technologies, but they've been limited and more narrow. Could we stop AI even if it's a general purpose technology? Yeah, it's a good question. I can't think of something off the top of my head, but I think my argument is that AI is different from past technologies and that difference if recognized by enough people could be the force for mobilizing against it. And I think we just have to try. you know like the way the technology comes into the world is also relevant um and you know even if in the long run you know humans will eventually build the obsoleting project will succeed like we will build you know universal labor replacing machines when and how that happens the matter enormously. And I'm not against building it at some point. I think it should just be when you know you can do it safely and when there's actual public buy-in. So you can make the case to people and they're making an informed consensual decision to bring this into the world. And so we should work from that ideal. And the way it's happening now is like break neck,

you know, speed, just ask for forgiveness, not permission. And that's the worst possible way it could be happening. And so, yeah, I think we can do better than that. And even if you think we can just shape it, slow it, guide it, whatever, like we should at least try doing that. And I think having more ambitious demands that people can all understand and get behind actually makes them more likely to succeed in some cases. So like the nuclear freeze was more ambitious than passed nuclear weapon campaigns which focus on single weapons and people just couldn't understand why it mattered and similarly the campaign has been focused on like a pause where it's like well what if we don't want to keep going in that direction um like what like it's not just about safety uh it's about like the direction the technology is going um and talking about super intelligence when i don't think that's necessary and i don't think people believe it but instead just being like, hey, we should just not, we should stop the obsoleting project, we should stop the race to replace us. Like, that's the thing I think you could rally people around. And, you know, nuclear weapons seemed inevitable, and then they almost went away. And so I think, if that could

happen, then we can do the same here. As you say, it matters a lot whether we develop AGI by 2030, or by 2050 or by 2100. So in some sense, technological determinism can be true on very long timescales, but our actions can still matter in the sense that whether we have decades to prepare our political and economic systems to the changes can actually make a massive difference in sort of the living standards and people's just general quality of life. Yeah, what can we actually do? if you're a normal person what can you do about this because it seems to be a process that involves basically heads of state CEOs of the biggest companies on earth what can and what can a normal person do about this problem I think depends on who you are where you are I think you could educate yourself about it tell other people about it find people who share your concerns if you're in the US, you could call your member of Congress. It actually does matter. Phone calls work best. And I think you can find organizations that are working on this. I mentioned Irreplaceable, which is just announced and is trying to build a climate movement style mass mobilization in the US.

specifically. And there are things that other countries can do as well. So countries can create public goods that would help make international treaties more possible. So verification technology is something that will be required for any deal to be trusted by parties that don't trust one another. The Reykjavik conversation that Reagan and Gorbachev had, Gorbachev was informed by the Palme commission, which was created by the former and then again, Swedish prime minister, Olaf Palme, which laid out this idea of common security. And so like this idea ended up informing this conversation. And so, you know, middle power countries can create technology and institutions and ideas and frameworks that could make deals possible between the US and China.

um and other countries can pressure these these governments to to stop uh because it's actually in their interest to do so you know if you're if you don't have any frontier ai companies in your borders and then your people get put out of work by them you're losing you know their their jobs you're losing tax revenue and you're not getting anything commensurate in return and so yeah i think like the whole world has a very strong interest in stopping this from happening um and they can you know bring diplomatic pressure on on these governments um and yeah i think like yeah finding people getting organized um thinking about what levers that you have and so if you have a platform you can use that platform i think basically people should look around at what levers they have available to pull and and pull them and then try and find other people and find bigger levers and just mobilization, movement building. It's been done before. Regular people were essential to the civil rights movement, to the nuclear freeze, to the climate movement.

And this can work. You just need to be ambitious and get off the couch. Garrison, thanks for chatting with me. It's been interesting. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I had a good time.