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33. Cursus Honorum of the AI Future Part 5 · Great Houses

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Gregory Treat: All right.
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Hello, everybody.
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Welcome to episode 33 of the Great Houses Forum, where we're continuing
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our conversation on how to build great houses, what those are, and
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at least what I think the future could look like, down this direction.
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right now we're in a series talking about what, what the cursus honorum
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of the AI future, would look like.
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So, recently if you haven't listened to my podcast with the great illustrious
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Will Tanner, you really should.
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I did a, a podcast on the Old World Show and, uh, you know, Will gave his
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excellent presentation of the Virginia cursus honorum, which for the record,
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it's my opinion that, he should be employed for the rest of his life.
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He should just be… Y- you know, people should pay him to travel around
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the country and explain the Virginia gentry, the, the Virginia cursus
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honorum, and how that worked and how that functioned and how they built it.
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I've heard him give that presentation probably four times now in various
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contexts, and every time, he's got something a little bit different,
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something new, something interesting.
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Um, and it's just such a fascinating subject.
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It's, it's a really, really important subject, um, because it's a… The-
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there's, there's pieces of the American experiment, the American Constitution,
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the American myth that worked really, really well in Virginia because of
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Virginia's aristocratic character.
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And, uh, they didn't work as well in other parts of the country, which
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sort of led to many of the compromises which, uh, which led us here.
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but I think it's worth noting that most of this stuff worked
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actually really well in Virginia.
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So he talked about that, and then I, I did a, my humble walkthrough
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of the Roman cursus honorum.
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and the point of the podcast was we were talking about the difference between
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a cursus-based system, a project-based system, and a credential-based system
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like the one that we've inherited from, you know, the late Great WASP culture.
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it was a fascinating conversation.
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We talked about flock cameras and, and kinda how technological solutions work
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and, and, and what their strengths are, but also just the basic recognition
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that you're not gonna be able to save our culture just by increasing
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the technology available to us.
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Flock cameras are not gonna save us when we can't arrest people for DEI
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reasons, that's the basic challenge.
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Um, and so underneath the episode that I did with Will, there was, there was
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an implied question that I don't know if we did the best job of highlighting.
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And that, that was what has gone wrong with our credentialing system, and I
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suppose the larger question is what do we do about it, We… like, the,
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the answer is, well, instead of having a credentialing system, we should
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have something like a cursus honorum.
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but I just wanted to start by honing in on that question.
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What has gone wrong?
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Noah Revoy put out in a recent article, this existing credential system, it keeps
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churning out elites, For, for some values of, of that term, and the country keeps
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getting leaders that it cannot trust.
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Like, there's something about the way that we're producing leaders where at this
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point, at the scale that we're operating with the pressures and maybe with the,
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the general stock that we have in the country, uh, where we're not getting good
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outcomes, that seems to be a very durable effect of whatever it is that we're doing.
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And so I, you know, I think, I think most of us, certainly the people on
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this call, a- and I think broadly in the country too, at least suspect that
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there is something deeply wrong with the talent pipelines in our country, And m-
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the answer I think that, that we need to consider is what does a cursus honorum
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look like in the AI future as AI is shaping our world, just to give us all
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some context, the modern classroom, the modern credentialing system was really
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built to upskill Prussian peasants, You're talking, you know, mid, uh, 19th century,
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the century that starts with an 1800.
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mid-19th century, Prussians that, are basically loyal,
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that are incredibly homogenous.
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Um, the earlier Prussians had done an incredibly effective job
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at, making sure there was only one, uh, one basic bloodline in Prussia.
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which is a fascinating story that, that really when you, when you study that
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part of history a lot of the things that happened later in terms of Napoleon
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and, and then even, you know, the World Wars make a lot more sense when you
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understand that, that Prussia is, is this very ethnically distinct place
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and, and experiences itself that way.
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but the point was nothing in the design of the credentialing
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system was about fostering loyalty about… or about forming character.
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And, and to give them credit, that really wasn't the problem that they had to solve.
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It w- they were working with a deeply homogenous people and, you know, shared
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loyalties could basically be assumed, And this made sense in a world where
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democracy was making the lowest common denominator in terms of the character
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of the people the measure of society.
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and I'll say that this worked pretty well in a world, number one, where
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every man was armed with a gun.
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and number two, where, the Europeans had just spent 700 years executing 1 to 2%
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of the population every generation, which is basically the most criminal elements.
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they executed criminals, but they did not execute people just
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for having violent tendencies.
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If you had non-criminal violent tendencies they had clear pathways for you to go
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serve your country and get rewarded for it and have, have all that stuff,
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There really is a sense in which an armed society is a polite society, So
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the education system depended, that the credentialing system that, that we have
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depended on that sort of virtue coming in from the peasantry, and they thought
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that all that was needed to unlock even greater virtue was, this kind of
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upskilling so that we could get the peasants greater earning power, they'd
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have more disposable income, and that would just usher in the eschaton, The,
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the, this is, this is the great promise of, kind of the, the modernist view of
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capitalism, But in practice, what this led was to what, what I called in my
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podcast with Will, uh, ungrounded virtue, when, when you do the credentialing
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things, you, you advance by leaving.
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You go from the farm to, to a smaller city, you know, then from the city
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to the university town, and from the university town to, like, the
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state house and then to Washington.
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and you never really go back.
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Once you advance, once you're sorted into some higher tier of existence
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with a bunch of other, end of the bell curve, high IQ, high virtue
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people, you never go back home.
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you never check to see if, if your own fields are still producing,
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Which is quite different from how the Virginia cursus honorum worked.
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and so what, what gets called virtue is really just a, a set
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of pure ideas, maybe a, a set of propositions we might even say.
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And, and, and this is, of course, where the idea of a
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propositional nation comes from.
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It's, it's the result of what does it mean to be somebody who excels in these kind
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of free-floating university systems where it's not about demonstrated character.
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Like, character is not what gets you the jobs.
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What gets you the jobs, what gets you advancement, what gets you promotion,
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what gets you social status is being able to correctly affirm the propositions
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that are, the social religion of the day, whatever that happens to be, Now,
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when the social religion of the day was basically traditional Christianity as it
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had been practiced for, more or less 1,000 years, 2,000 years, that wasn't so bad.
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especially because many of these people did actually have deep convictions.
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Many of these people did have, you know, spiritual experiences.
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You see, I mean, even as late as the 1850s, people are, at, at that point
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in time, Harvard's, its first year for its law track and its pastoral track
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were a year-long course in the Book of Romans in Latin, taught in Latin.
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Um, fascinatingly, uh, I, I was doing some research and the clanker informs me that
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there is a material connection between the amount of Latin that's being taught in, in
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schools and the amount of mass violence.
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The less Latin that's being taught, the less Latin that we're teaching,
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uh, the more that our wars get violent and kind of, you know, democratically
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to, to the knife, as it were, right?
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When you teach Latin in your schools, then your elites go out and fight,
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and they may kill each other.
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But by and large, they leave the civilians out of it.
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War becomes this kind of aristocratic territorial thing.
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But the less you teach Latin, especially when you go From having Latin be
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something that you use to study other subjects, you know, they kept Latin
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around in the, the high-end schools probably until right before World War
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I. but, uh, but in between the 1850s and 1870s, most of the places in the
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West, it stopped being a thing that you used, you used to study other subjects.
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But so for a while there, Harvard had, uh, for a long time, Harvard had the,
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the first year of its law track and the first year of its pastoral track were
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a one-year course in Romans and Latin, and you could switch between majors, at
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any time, and several people had, you know, genuine religious experiences.
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So it was this propositional thing, but there was, there, there
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was still a groundedness to it.
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There was still something that, that was real.
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Of course, as we move into progressivism in the, the 1920s, like, the, the set
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of ideas that are being taught by the universities just gets farther and farther
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and farther, not just from a thing that, that the people of America or the people
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of the West had traditionally believed, but it got farther and farther away from a
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thing that a people as such could believe.
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It became kind of the, this niche, elite set of philosophies that,
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couldn't even be understood by, a normal IQ person, let alone practiced
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in any meaningful fashion, right?
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So, so what gets ca- And, and this becomes virtue, right?
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So what gets called virtue becomes this kind of free-floating thing.
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It's not really grounded in a place, a people.
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There's no, uh, reputation in it.
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You're expected to come in with very different ideas and change
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your ideas to the new thing that the university is, uh, is teaching.
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So there's no penalty cost.
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There can't be a penalty cost for coming in and dramatically changing
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everything you've said because you're now in a new environment.
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That's what the environment kind of expects.
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So this produces a world, where we, we can't rely on anything, right?
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No one, no one has any, any basis for internal personal character.
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That's the strategy.
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That strategy, well, we come into a new place, and we kind of parrot whatever
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the reigning, social religion is.
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That actually doesn't produce high-character people who can be relied
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upon to make important decisions, which leads us to, you know, the flock
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camera questions, one of the things I wanna point out, and, and I'm a,
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I'm a big promoter of, of, um, AI.
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I think AI is gonna be a great invention.
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I think many of these new technologies are gonna change
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the world for the better, right?
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I think robotics and all this stuff, medicine is gonna get better.
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Construction is gonna get better.
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A bunch of things are gonna get cheaper.
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People are gonna live longer.
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But I mean, I do think that there is going to be dystopian outcomes, right?
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There are going to be places and times and, and, and specific groups of
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people that are gonna endure weird and dystopian things, as bad or worse as
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anything that's been done in history.
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So, what, what creates this dystopia is the, the, a mismatch between the social
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organization and, and kinda the, the powers of the technology, your technology
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requires a certain set of social ordering in order to manage it effectively.
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This is my aristocratic democratic, uh, technology thesis.
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Um, and so when you have an aristocratic social structure attempting to
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manage a democratic technology like firearms, and you don't update your
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social structure as the technology becomes more and more dominant,
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then you get the French Revolution.
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But when you have a democratic social structure trying to manage aristocratic
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technologies, I think you get COVID.
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Like, I think that's basically what COVID was.
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I think you have… I think the, the, the, the biotechnology, uh, is, is clearly an
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aristocratic technology by my definitions.
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and I don't think that can be managed effectively under our democratic system.
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And so the way that, that that was pursued was, was weird and, and it had to be
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covered up, and that led to bad outcomes, And even still to this day, we still
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can't really grapple with whatever it was that, that, that Anthony Fauci was doing.
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A- as evidenced by the fact that he came and testified, he invoked
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the Fifth Amendment when he had no legal right to do so, and Congress
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did not call him in contempt, right?
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We cannot manage whatever was going on in that lab, whatever, whatever, you
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know, the government's involvement was, whatever, you know, the… just, just…
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we ca- like, the only thing we can do with technologies like that is ban them,
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Which is what ostensibly we've done.
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Uh, you know, the, the, that, that's the hypothetical thing that we've done
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is we, we ban uh, research into, in to gain of function, all this stuff.
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And to the extent that we haven't banned it, the extent we're still trying to use
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that or get a, get a hold on or even, you know, potentially defend ourselves
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against it, those things can't, can't be acknowledged or, or effectively
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grappled with by our democratic system.
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The system just doesn't work, So I think the right question when we think
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about technological improvements is under what conditions, and by that
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I mean social conditions, under what social management system will these
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technologies be used appropriately?
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Who is gonna have to be in charge?
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What, what kind of person will be in charge?
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How do you get that kind of person?
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And, and what, what restraints, what accountability structures, what happens
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to that person if he abuses his power?
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And who enforces that decision on him, How does that work, All these
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new technologies, they create thrones.
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They create seats of power.
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who's gonna sit on those thrones?
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and I'll note parenthetically, we cannot avoid this problem.
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I wanna go on record, predicting that the worst outcomes will come
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from pretending that we can create a power position, we can create a
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throne, and not have anyone in it.
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Someone is going to sit in that throne, if we say, "Well, well, we don't want
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that," I mean, again, your options are basically ban the technology entirely
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or more likely, what, what you're saying is, "Well, we just want you to lie.
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We want you to tell us that there's no throne and there's no one sitting in it."
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And in fact, we're gonna have somebody like Anthony Fauci making
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life-altering decisions for the world with no accountability mechanism.
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Okay?
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So the bottleneck here is human beings.
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We need a supply of high-character men, men that have been formed,
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that, that have been tested in, in a public way, not, not tested by,
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like, proxy tests in a classroom.
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we need th- to know that they're trustworthy.
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We need demonstrations of their character before we hand them tools that can
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hurt a whole city or a whole society.
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And, and that's a trust problem.
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And, there's two bad ways to interact with a trust problem.
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One is to say, "Well, Trust is a black box. You can't predict
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it. All we can worry about is capacity." That doesn't work.
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The other thing that you can do is say, "Well, we can just
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assume everyone is trustworthy.
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Giving people education and, you know, taking them out of bad social
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situations, we just remove them.
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If no one is hurting them, then they'll automatically be
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trustworthy." That doesn't work.
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But there is a way to kind of vet people for trust, And, and that way has
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worked every time that we've tried it.
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to abuse a quote from G.K. Chesterton, the cursus honorum has not been,
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been tried and found wanting, it has been found hard and rarely tried.
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honorum.
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So Rome called this method the cursus honorum.
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The, the… That just means the, the, the course of honors.
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and Virginia ran an, an kind of Anglican cavalier version of the same idea.
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Britain, the British gentry were formed by the same kinda sets of, set of things.
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Um, so th- this is Western civilization's method.
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If, if your, your problem is, hey, we actually need… We, we have
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technologies that need to be entrusted to unusually high-character people.
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These are… These technologies are too powerful, too dangerous,
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too, um, difficult to manage.
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The consequences of having somebody misuse these powerful positions is so
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destructive, so scary that we just, we don't want everyone to have it, We don't
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want everyone to have a nuclear weapon.
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We don't want everyone to have a nuclear reactor.
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so what do you do?
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you make people ascend through a set of tasks and figure out who you can
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trust who's worthy of, being extended these super high levels of trust.
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but Rome had, the, there's the lower offices and the higher offices.
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So Rome had… You start being a military tribune, and so you had to command
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soldiers in a legion successfully, right?
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In battle almost always.
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Um, Rome was basically always at war, or they were, you know, you could send
15:15
a legion off to, to deal with bandits.
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Um, then you became a quaestor, um, or quaestor.
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Uh, you know, my… So my Latin is not, uh, not the best pronunciation, boys.
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So, um, and, and this meant you were involved in the, the, the
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public accounts of the treasury or, or served as a financial
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deputy for a provincial governor.
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Um, and, and you know, you were, you were kind of like an auditor.
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Your, your, your goal was where is the money going?
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And, and let's… You know, Rome had kind of a curious set of interactions with
15:42
what we would modernly call corruption.
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But, but they, they had a se- You had to develop a sense for what was too
15:47
much corruption, and you had to deal with it, Uh, then there was the, uh,
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the aedile, um, which supervised the markets, the weights and measures, the
15:54
water, the public buildings, and most importantly, put on the big public
15:57
games, the big celebrations, the annual celebrations, and then the, the occasional
16:01
celebrations that would happen when, uh, when somebody died or when there
16:05
was a, a, a major victory for Rome.
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Um, that's what the aedile did.
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And, and the aedile was, was this important figure 'cause if you, if
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you'd risen to that level, that was a, that was a very honorable rank.
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You got to have a, a Roman death mask.
16:17
You, you… Which is kinda like a tangible, a tangible expression of
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what people were striving for in Roman society, which was this, this
16:24
concept of immortal glory, right?
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Immortal glory was what Rome was, was oriented towards.
16:29
and if you got to be the i- you got to the aedile rank, and then you got
16:32
to have a Roman death mask, then you, you had achieved something, It also
16:36
pretty much guaranteed that you would be inducted into the Senate the next
16:39
time there was an opening So above that there was the, the, the praetor, uh,
16:44
which, which screened civil claims.
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They would, they would frame issues for private judges.
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They would issue the annual edict.
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Um, and then, and then after they'd served as a praetor for a while, they would be
16:54
sent out to govern a province or command an army, and it was kind of seen as
16:57
this training position for being consul.
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And the consuls ruled Rome effectively.
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There was always, there were two consuls in the, the Republic,
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uh, the period of the Republic.
17:06
They presided over the Senate, the assemblies, they conducted elections,
17:08
they carried out policies, and they were the top generals, right?
17:11
Rome had this interesting unitary structure where they didn't really
17:15
have this concept of civilian rank that didn't have, like,
17:18
some kind of military component.
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Um, these were all effectively drawn from the army.
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note that from beginning to end, Rome's military structure was paramount.
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It had to produce and maintain commanders who could lead men in battle.
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and it was just really effective at doing that, right?
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There's this scene, I'm… This is one of the things in the podcast with
17:33
Will that I was like, "Man, I should have, I should have said that better."
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Um, where there, there's a scene where, uh, Hannibal sends his brother back
17:41
to Carthage, and he, they dump seven or eight gallons of gold rings on the
17:45
floor, uh, of, of the, the Carthaginian Senate, and basically said, "We have
17:50
wiped out their leadership class. Rome is finished," They'd killed tens of thousands
17:55
of men and a bunch of the leaders, and Rome is able to restock the Senate.
17:59
They're able to refill all the, the leadership roles.
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People just kind of slot in, and within a year or two they, they have
18:05
to send out the Fabians to, to do this delaying action to buy them a little
18:09
bit of time to, to rebuild the army.
18:11
But they are able to replace the leadership class, oh so fast.
18:15
Oh, s- so much faster than anybody expected.
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and then they win the Punic Wars, Now, an interesting point, uh, that I'll make
18:22
about this, is for these high offices, these offices where you would leave,
18:25
one of the things is your household had to run well enough that you could
18:28
leave without dysfunction setting in.
18:30
Y- y- your household had to run, ideally well enough that it was
18:33
actually sending you money to help maintain yourself and to do the
18:36
things you needed to do on campaign.
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if your household wasn't very strong, it was acceptable, though, kind of frowned
18:42
upon, to pull funds from the public purse to maintain yourself in the field.
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But what was illegal, what was, what was problematic, what they really wanted to
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avoid was somebody being in a position where their, their house at home was
18:53
failing, and so they were put in this position where they needed to draw public
18:56
funds that were supposed to be for the campaign to send back to Rome to, uh, to
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kind of make sure that their house could keep functioning and they wouldn't lose
19:05
property or whatever, interestingly, Paul borrows from the language that Rome
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uses for its praetors and consuls, these guys that need to operate in the field.
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And, and, and that, that, that language influences his, his description, his
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requirements for Christian elders in the, the, uh, pastoral epistles, So, keep
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your children in submission with all due gravity is, uh, is, is a phrase that is
19:25
really similar to how they talked about, "Hey, this is what you have to do. This
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is what you have to be in order for us to consider you for a praetorship or,
19:35
uh, certainly for a consulship," right?
19:37
'Cause if you… I mean, if you're consul, you might need to go out
19:39
in the field for a year, right?
19:41
Um, Rome also had some fascinating voting privileges.
19:45
So basically, in order to, to be at the highest rank, you had to have enough
19:49
money on hand to, to buy your own Roman kit, the… which is the kit that Paul
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talks about in Ephesians, the armor of God, right, the belt, and the shoes, and
19:58
the, the breastplate, and the shield, and the sword, and all of those things.
20:02
it wasn't a market cost exactly 'cause Rome produced it and sold
20:04
it at, at a pretty much fixed cost, but that was the price.
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If you had that much money, that's what gave you the, the highest rank
20:10
and kind of full voting rights.
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And if you had less than that, then your, your voting rights kind of
20:15
went down proportionally to, to, uh, your ability to afford that cost.
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It's also the same cost as, as, uh, being able to pay for a year's worth
20:24
of a century, which was, ironically a century should mean 100 men.
20:27
For complicated historical reasons, it meant about 80 men.
20:30
Um- And so that was, that was the same amount of money, was, okay,
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could you field your own century?
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Could you be a centurion of, you know, these 80 guys that are g- need to be out
20:40
in the field, they're gonna need to be fed, they're gonna need to be maintained
20:43
as we're going out and doing something.
20:44
and, and you had to be that caliber of person to really
20:48
make it into the higher levels.
20:49
now obviously Rome had a bunch of complicated ways.
20:51
If you were talented but you didn't have money, they weren't gonna wall you out.
20:55
There w- there was gonna be a way for, for you to, to make the money work.
20:58
But that- those were the formal standards, Then in Virginia, um, the, the, the
21:02
foundation was, was the plantation, You had to produce tobacco by managing
21:05
land, labor, merchants, and debt.
21:07
And, and the idea here was they, they wanted it set so that i- you
21:11
couldn't qualify just by working really hard, they didn't want it to
21:16
be something where, well, this guy, he just works, uh, 120 hours a week,
21:20
and he's able to do that, right?
21:21
No, they wanted it to be you need to have- People, teams of people, probably
21:27
slaves in Virginia, You'd have teams of people working your land, Three
21:30
to five people, three to five slaves working your land, which is kind of
21:34
the minimum for what you needed to do.
21:36
Because the point was you had to get th- those laborers to perform with excellence
21:41
to produce high-quality tobacco leaves.
21:43
So it was about wisdom.
21:44
Can you communicate to people, who are much lower IQ than you probably, how to
21:49
do the things you need at the quality levels you need them to do it at?
21:52
And that was their foundational requirement.
21:54
If you couldn't figure out how to do that, you just didn't get in, Then above that,
21:58
there was the parish vestry, uh, which was again, dealing, dealing with, a bunch of
22:02
people who were less successful than you.
22:04
and the idea was you, you had to be able to do that.
22:07
You had to fulfill your, your function.
22:09
So you, you're responsible for kinda doling out, know, alms
22:12
and taking care of poor people, taking care of widows and orphans.
22:15
And y- you had to not just do that, but you had to do
22:18
that with a sense of dignity.
22:19
You had to do that in a way that the community approved of.
22:21
If you just kind of showed up and threw money at people and rode off,
22:25
that would get around, number one, and people would be unhappy with you.
22:28
Even if you technically fulfilled the position, um, you would not probably
22:33
get, you'd probably not get renewed at the end of it, and you would not
22:35
get asked to ascend to a higher level, which, you know, is, is, is interesting
22:38
because there, there's nothing like these, these types of honors, um, the-
22:43
these types of, of secondary requirements are often what we optimize away in kind
22:48
of our modern capitalistic society.
22:50
It tends to… We get very, we get very autistic about what is the task
22:54
that we're doing right now, and we hyper optimize for that task and that
22:58
task alone, and that means that we, we don't develop the, the skills that
23:02
allow us to ascend to the higher levels.
23:04
So above the parish ventry, uh, vestry, there was the justice of the peace.
23:07
There was the county court.
23:09
you know, they, they would hear cr- civil and criminal cases.
23:11
The minister, uh, you know, the, the county justice.
23:14
And then above that, there was the House of Burgesses and then, you know, people,
23:16
the higher levels were speaker, council member, continental delegate, et cetera.
23:19
Um, and interestingly, and, and if you want more information on this, again,
23:23
just, just listen to, to my podcast with Will or any, really any of the podcasts w-
23:27
uh, w- that Will Tanner has done recently.
23:29
And he's also put out a, just an amazing article on the subject of the Virginia
23:33
gentry, uh, which, which I fully intend to have my children, when, when it's
23:37
time for them to learn about this topic, they're gonna read that essay,
23:39
I'm committed to that, cause I, I very much doubt that I'll find anything
23:43
better between, between now and then.
23:44
but you had to do all these things as you're ascending kind of up
23:47
the ranks while still maintaining the quality of your tobacco leaf.
23:51
That was seen as, as a proxy for your character and your skill
23:54
at training, managing, and, and inspiring loyalty, right?
23:57
That, so these people, again, these, these people who were probably lower IQ
24:00
than you were so well-trained, there was so much excellence, there was so much
24:04
loyalty that you could leave for three, six months and the, the quality of the
24:10
tobacco leaf wouldn't go down, right?
24:13
Which is not nothing, okay?
24:14
Um, Britain had a similar thing.
24:16
I won't go into the, the, the whole thing, uh, of the British gentry,
24:19
but, but you know, I've, I've done a couple of episodes on it.
24:22
Uh, but, but the thing that I wanna focus on for, for, for today's purposes is the
24:26
idea that, that you, you had to issue and manage private currencies in effect.
24:32
You, you, you kind of had a personal c- credit, a personal currency, and
24:36
your house had a, had a currency.
24:38
You know, your, your wife's family might have… There, there would be
24:40
different ventures and different, you know, corporations, different
24:43
structures that people would make, and all of them would immediately
24:45
start issuing notes and bonds and, and various financial instruments that
24:49
could be used in that day like currency.
24:52
There was, there was, you know, all of those, all of those things.
24:55
Um, so that was a really important skill, and the British government
25:01
wanted its aristocrats to have that skill before they put them
25:05
in, in, in governmental positions.
25:07
Because basically all governmental positions involved this organ
25:10
of the government or this office has the right to issue bonds.
25:14
That's how they funded themselves from, you know, 1600 on.
25:17
Um, and I mean, that, that's basically what I… This is, this
25:20
is what I was talking about in the, in the Churchill episodes, right?
25:22
So this is the, the, the, the method of governance that John Churchill, um,
25:28
kind of pioneered, and it was what, what led to the, the development of the
25:33
gentry throughout the next 400 years until, you know, until the gentry kind
25:36
of meet their end in, in the fields of Flanders in World War I, right?
25:39
But so for that period of time, the British government really needed
25:43
people, that could manage, private currencies or these, these, these
25:47
weird bonds that, that could be, that could be spent like currency.
25:50
And so the, the way that it, it handled that, the way that it figured out…
25:53
Like, you couldn't administrate a test and say, "Well, do you know how to, how to
25:57
manage a currency?" 'Cause I mean, well, sure I know how to manage a currency.
26:00
Um, the test is c- could this guy manage his personal credit?
26:05
If he can't, we're not gonna put him… He's not gonna ascend to high rank
26:09
because all of the high-ranking positions in the British Empire require you to
26:12
manage, uh, you know, effectively a, a, a sub-currency, So, all three of these
26:17
things, um, it, it's the same lesson.
26:20
They, they have this tiered structure.
26:22
They have broader goals.
26:24
and they're really helping pe- They're testing not just can you do
26:28
the task, but can you do the task with an eye to the bigger picture?
26:32
Okay.
26:32
Uh, one of the ways of describing this is, is that these, these ladders, they, they
26:35
train something closer to a priestly role.
26:38
So you have long-term care of a people, a place, you have to develop some kind
26:42
of public trust, and, you know, the, the results may not show up for years, right?
26:46
Feedback is slow, and you have to develop your reputation across, you
26:50
know, seasons and years and decades.
26:53
And people can go back and check, right?
26:55
There, there's gonna be a public reputation that follows
26:58
you from thing to thing.
26:59
And, and, and, and if you build something… And it was one of the
27:03
important things, and this is, this was especially true in the, I mean,
27:05
in, in all of them, um, in Rome as well, but, but also in the British
27:09
and the, and the Virginia, uh, gentry.
27:11
I- if you built something, your personal name and credit was attached to it, right?
27:16
Uh, one of the interesting things about the way that Rome did, uh, its,
27:19
its diplomatic ventures is they would send a high-ranking senator, And the
27:23
senator would conduct the negotiations with a foreign power, and they would
27:28
sign a treaty, And in that treaty, the senator would place their personal
27:33
reputation on the line, and they would say, "And I promise," basically, "to,
27:37
in good faith, attempt to get Rome to ratify the treaty." By the way, Rome
27:41
did not always ratify the treaties.
27:43
Um, Rome did not always go along with this.
27:46
Uh, but so it was, it was kind of a risk.
27:48
But your personal name and reputation was basically
27:52
associated with, with that treaty.
27:54
And so unless you had some really good reason why it wasn't your fault, if
27:58
that thing collapses later, it's on you.
28:00
You've gotta figure out how to solve the problem, okay?
28:03
And again, the, uh, the requirement stacks.
28:05
You always remain responsible, uh, to be qualified for the lesser included offices.
28:10
If the quality of your tobacco leaf drops, if there is a run on your personal
28:13
credit, then that could very well be disqualifying even years or decades
28:16
later, And, and again, the thing that I said this earlier, you know, character
28:20
formation is not a black box, right?
28:22
Uh, we, we have-- we've gotten addicted in our society to having short-term…
28:29
Wh-what we want is we have a need, we expect the market to
28:33
fill that need very quickly.
28:34
All we do is we apply capital, and the capital is supposed to be able
28:37
to source someone who just appears from nowhere with all of the skills
28:41
and, and all of the capacities.
28:42
And, and e-even if somebody isn't skilled, we really want them to
28:46
appear within, like, a two-year framework, otherwise we're really mad.
28:49
Okay?
28:49
Um, and, and, and then we say, "Well, if we can't get it in two years,
28:53
we've gotta do-- we've gotta just do something like, you know, import a
28:56
bunch of people from around the world." 'Cause we couldn't possibly say, "Well,
29:00
no, actually, we should plan on the long term to meet this need," right?
29:04
And this has been fashionable basically since our elites turned so hard against
29:06
Christian morality in the latter half of the 19th century, just to kinda treat
29:10
character formation as a black box.
29:11
We, we wanna pretend that we don't know what causes moral failures,
29:16
and basically what causes moral failures is when you stop having
29:18
h-h- holding people accountable.
29:20
It's when you stop saying, "Character matters, and we're going to evaluate
29:24
your character at each level of a public or semi-public, demonstration.
29:28
And, hey, you might not lose your position, you might not lose your job
29:32
if you, m- fail the character test, but you're not gonna advance anything
29:36
more," actually… And, and one of the thing-- important things is if someone
29:38
is qualified at a lower level, you don't want them to lose their job if
29:42
they're not, if they're not excellent at the thing they're doing, right?
29:45
All that does is, is ensure that, you know, people, the, the, the continuation
29:49
of, of the Peter principle, right?
29:50
Which is that people rise to the level of their incompetence.
29:53
What you want is somebody who rises to the level where they can do the job, right?
29:57
And then if they don't, if they're not demonstrating signs that they
30:00
have excess moral capacity to do higher and better things, you just
30:03
want them to stay there, right?
30:04
A whole bunch of people would get to the, the ideal level, right?
30:08
The, the level where you're, you're conducting the games, and
30:10
they would just kinda stay there.
30:11
They'd get their, their, their death mask, their Roman death mask.
30:13
They, they had some level of, um, of honor.
30:16
They'd get inducted into the Senate, and then they would just kind of sit there
30:19
in the Senate for the rest of their life.
30:21
That was a very normal thing.
30:22
They never showed the capacity to say, "Hey, I, I could actually, you know, go
30:26
on campaign for six months and my house wouldn't fall apart." There's lots of guys
30:30
that were solid guys that, that, that won glory and honor for, for themselves and
30:34
their house and their nation that didn't meet that standard, and that was okay.
30:39
They weren't shamed for that.
30:40
They just weren't selected for greater honor, okay?
30:43
Now, I think the, the traditional answer of, the modernists and, and
30:47
then the post-modernists then, "Well, we're, we're just gonna kind of grow
30:49
our way out of that. Growth is the cure that solves all ills. So if we can
30:53
just, if we can just grow, then that will, that will solve this problem."
30:59
And I, I, I think we're, we're coming to the end of where that's a viable strategy.
31:03
It seems to me that, that, uh, growth is not enough, right?
31:07
So what do we do when growth is not enough?
31:09
Um, so we, we have a, a new set of super powerful tools, right?
31:13
We have flock cameras, AI, drones, robots.
31:16
And, and, and I, I, um, w- one of the points of this episode is, is to say,
31:19
okay, there is a real risk that there are dystopian outcomes from these things.
31:24
So the question I wanna say is, well, under what circumstances could these
31:27
technologies be used for good, when the operators have been formed and screened
31:30
and the system treats character as the most important piece, Where we say, "Hey,
31:36
we, we actually don't want someone to be a VP of flock cameras unless he has
31:41
a lot of demonstrated character right?"
31:43
We, we actually want that to… We, we want to select.
31:46
We would say we would, we would rather not have someone, we would rather
31:50
have someone that, that doesn't have the highest capacity if, if he comes
31:54
with that potential moral failure.
31:56
We don't want him.
31:57
I don't care how high capacity he is.
31:58
I don't want that guy sitting in that seat because the, the amount
32:03
of power that he has is so dangerous and so destructive that, that, that
32:08
we won't get good outcomes, right?
32:10
So what, what would it look like, what could it look like if we actually
32:13
tried to design a system that would produce men whose capacity, whose
32:16
skill at using the new technologies was paired with moral formation, right?
32:20
And what you would do is the same thing as what the, the cursus guys done-
32:24
did in, in, in Rome and, and Virginia.
32:26
You, you allow other people's decisions to validate the thesis of the skill
32:29
set under question rather than, than creating a credentialing system and
32:33
testing them in an artificial environment.
32:35
Now, this means you m- you may have to provide training, you
32:37
may have to provide assistance for the people playing this game.
32:40
Um, you know, in, in the British gentry, the- there, there's a lot of evidence
32:43
that there were, there were guys that were probably funded by the British government,
32:47
that they would, they would make sure that, that if you were a young aristocrat,
32:50
you kinda got a fair shake, right?
32:52
That, that, that credit was extended to you really whether you deserved it or not.
32:56
And it wasn't maybe large amounts, but it was enough to keep you going and they,
32:59
they just didn't want somebody to find themselves in a position where, "Hey,
33:03
I, I, I guessed wrong the first couple times that I tried to play this game,
33:06
and that put me out of the game," right?
33:08
Um, destroying this noble house.
33:10
They, they didn't want that to happen and so they, they behaved
33:12
kind of in, in collegial ways.
33:14
There was this sense of we- we're, we're not… this is not a cutthroat game.
33:17
We're playing here, right?
33:19
Uh, but, but we're playing a game with rules and, and we're playing a game
33:23
where the goal is to keep playing the game and to possibly recruit these
33:27
people for a higher game, right?
33:29
If you're, if you're playing a game in a, in a league and, and the goal of
33:33
everyone is to recruit the best players out of these teams to form a super
33:37
team, you're gonna behave differently.
33:39
You're not… It's not gonna be as cutthroat, And I, I think, you know,
33:42
hopefully it's obvious to people that, that we, we have lost this.
33:45
again, I, I've spent some time talking about what I think the three skills
33:48
of, of AI and, and again, I could be, I could be wrong about this.
33:50
There could be five skills, there could be 10 skills, but let's just
33:53
say that the, these skills are, are code, content, and command.
33:56
So code means you can see the logical flow of what you want the machine to do.
34:00
You understand the logical architecture of the work.
34:02
Content is, is rhetoric, especially, you know, the kind of rhetoric that scales up.
34:05
It's, it's influencers, it's TikTok videos, it's, it's, uh, PR, right?
34:10
And, and depending on your perspective, that can look like pro- propaganda or it
34:12
can look like motivation and, you know, again, your, your, your, your orientation
34:17
towards the morality and the cause of the person doing this, this activity probably
34:21
greatly influences your opinion of it.
34:23
Um, and then command means that you can work inside the structure, probably
34:26
the custom structure that you have built, and then use those custom
34:30
commands or, you know, macros at the right time and in the right place and
34:33
take responsibility for the decision.
34:35
Um, and, and again, I think, I think, as I've said in, in prior
34:38
episodes, I think this is gonna be…
34:39
there's gonna be incredible gains to, from optimizing AI systems to say,
34:45
"Hey, there's this point where the AI has to make a decision instead of just
34:49
presenting options." And it… the, the token sco- to- costs of the AI making
34:56
that decision scale to ridiculous degrees.
34:59
You can dramatically reduce the cost of, um…
35:04
So, and, and I've done this, right, in, in, in my AI work.
35:07
When I do a presentation like this or, or I do an essay, you know, there
35:12
are… I've, I've gotten… I've actually gotten pretty good essays
35:16
out of some of the frontier models by just saying, "Loop on, on this stuff
35:20
until you get a, a top-tier essay." But it'll use, you know, 10, 20% of your
35:25
monthly allotment in one shot, right?
35:27
Whereas I was able to do this presentation with, I think, one and a half percent
35:31
of my, uh, of my monthly allotment because I made all the decisions, right?
35:36
It, it would present me with options.
35:37
It would present me with, well, here's, here are the things, and at these
35:41
points you could, you could just do any one of these three options and,
35:45
and sometimes I would override and say, "No, you, you've gotten that wrong."
35:47
But, but a lot of times I was able to pick this, pick that, pick that, and,
35:51
and that dramatically reduces the token cost of, of, of what you're doing there.
35:56
Okay?
35:57
So, um, so when I say the AI era will, will, again, hopefully produce a cursus
36:02
honorum, I mean a series of games, a series of engagements that train and
36:06
test those three functions and kind of demonstrates your capacity, right?
36:09
So we're gonna discuss a progression with, with alternate
36:12
pathways at each, at each level.
36:13
That, that, that doesn't necessarily mean that I think
36:15
there will be alternate pathways.
36:16
I, I, I suspect that at some point our society will, um, will hone in on, on the
36:22
preferred way of ascending this ladder.
36:25
Um, but I don't know what that is yet.
36:27
I don't, I don't think anyone can predict what that is yet.
36:29
And, and, and the point of this design would be to produce AI paladins.
36:32
Right now that's my word.
36:32
I, I… I mean, unless I'm vastly more successful than, uh, than I am
36:36
right now, that, that probably won't be the word that people will use.
36:39
Um, but they, they will have this sense of we want high character people.
36:43
We want high quality, but we also want high character people a- and
36:47
we don't, we don't want… We're uncomfortable with just trusting
36:49
this to people who have gotten a credential from a university, right?
36:54
Um, so we want trustworthy men whose mastery of all three core
36:57
skills gives them an incredible multiplier on their value, okay?
37:00
So level one, I, I think you would start with, with bits,
37:03
uh, control of bits, software.
37:05
Uh, so this pathway looks like the ability to manage an AI rather
37:08
than having the AI manage you.
37:09
It means, as I said, understanding the log- logical architecture of
37:12
what you want the computer to do, how it's getting there, and this
37:15
is, this is probably grammar.
37:16
I mean, uh, you know, again, it, it involves, in my experience,
37:19
a lot of actual literal grammar.
37:21
I spend a bunch of time when the AI makes a mistake or does something
37:24
that I don't want, I say, "Tell me what your word for this is," right?
37:29
And it tells me.
37:30
It, it has a vector where it says, "Oh, this is the word that,
37:32
that, that, that, uh, that I think this, uh, this verbal tick is."
37:36
And I say, "Okay, well, never do that ever again. Um, and, and let's talk
37:40
about how to fix that when it pops up, how to recognize it." And, and so it's,
37:43
it's… I have to remember the grammar.
37:46
I have to understand how the thing talks to itself and insert my own
37:51
content into, uh, into that loop as it's running, and that's what allows
37:56
me to do what I, what I do with AI.
37:58
Um, and, and this is what it'll allow people to… You gotta read
38:01
the output, understand why the AI what… did what it did, and know
38:04
how to influence its own behavior.
38:05
Right now, this is probably somebody who can set up their own
38:07
AI harness or, at a minimum, their own second brain tuned to them.
38:10
In the future, it probably looks like, uh, completing the training or
38:13
fine-tuning of a model, uh, to, to be something that's kinda custom-designed
38:17
for them or designing maybe, maybe penetration testing software platforms.
38:21
And, um, and, and of course, in the AI era, the, the penetration testing
38:26
is starting to, to, to mean a lot more things because you can sort of
38:32
socially hack AI, which is a, which is a fascinating… But that gets into the
38:35
other level one gateway that I think we'll see, uh, which is narrative.
38:39
Uh, so this will look like, uh, building an audience with AI-augmented tools.
38:43
It'll look like running social media for a campaign or a legal defense.
38:46
And, you know, uh, what- whatever it looks like, you're, you're,
38:48
you're influencing people.
38:49
You're, you're understanding human psychology, right?
38:53
Uh, you're, you're, you're using rhetoric at a high level.
38:56
You're understanding what attracts people, what causes them to have emotion,
38:59
what causes them to agree with you.
39:01
Um, you know, this is, this is the skill that I'm not natively
39:05
gifted at, but I'm trying.
39:06
I'm learning.
39:07
I'm learning from some smart people, so, you know, I really
39:09
appreciate all the people that, uh, that have helped me, right?
39:13
And again, um, you know, uh, Balaji has, has ta- has talked about, you know, he
39:17
sees AI affecting the internet as a whole.
39:19
And so what he thinks is gonna happen is that AI is gonna just re-
39:21
wreck transactional markets, right?
39:23
So anything where you're interacting with a stranger, any, any transactional
39:27
game, uh, recruiting, sales, marketing, um, is gonna get flooded with AI
39:33
spam, slop, scams, all of that.
39:35
Uh, the- these channels, you know, the, the internet was, was built to be a, an
39:39
open system, kind of a high trust system.
39:40
A lot of people talk about that, DARPA net and all that stuff.
39:43
These channels were never built for, for the level of, of, of just
39:47
pure spam that, that, that can come out in an AI, uh, AI world.
39:53
And so those, those filters are gonna break.
39:55
So what are people gonna do?
39:56
They're gonna retreat.
39:57
They're gonna fall back into digital tribes.
39:59
They're gonna want deterministic gates.
40:00
They're gonna want proof that you're a human.
40:02
They're gonna want signed credentials, hard to fake signals.
40:04
Probably there's a pretty heavy crypto element to this.
40:08
Um, and, and, and the interesting thing is that, that will, that will probably
40:14
create, uh… There, there'll be, there will need to be a, well, some human signed
40:19
off on you joining the tribe, right?
40:21
Um, I'm a member of Exit and, uh, you know, Exit has a 30-minute phone call with
40:25
everyone that, that, that wants to join.
40:28
And I think that, that, that, you know, what's interesting about that
40:31
is that, that, that having that level of vetting alone has produced
40:36
absolutely incredible results in terms of the quality of the people, right?
40:39
And, and I think that sort of thing will, will only get stronger as, as people
40:44
get more and more comfortable with AI.
40:46
Um, this, this will probably be a position in the cursus honorum, right?
40:50
Um, so you're gonna have people who are assisted by AI who are saying, "How do
40:55
I establish relationships with other humans and with other AI silos, with
41:01
other cryptographic, uh, digital silos?"
41:03
And say, "We're gonna accord everyone in that digital silo some
41:07
level of identity with us because we trust their vetting mechanism.
41:11
We're sort of federating, uh, some level of proof of human, some level of, uh,
41:15
of trust there." So- But I think that, that could be if you've demonstrated
41:20
your command of software, and you've demonstrated your command of rhetoric,
41:22
so you're, you're able to kind of create a space that's, that's free of,
41:26
uh, psycho hazards, as it were, um, I think that that'll, that'll be…
41:30
That would be something that would be very useful to, to evaluate
41:35
someone's capacity and their goodwill, and again, their character, right?
41:38
Because this is… A lot of this is super character driven, right?
41:41
It's do, do you, do you resonate?
41:43
Do, do the vibes fit with this person?
41:46
And, and you know, we, we, we make decisions based on vibes, right?
41:49
Um, and, and, and you have to do this.
41:51
Like, one of the things, the interesting things, we've gotten so uncomfortable
41:55
with making decisions based on vibes.
41:56
I was having a conversation with a, with a guy, uh, recently, and he was
41:59
talking to me about, "You know, I had this meeting with this guy, and
42:01
I just didn't like him, you know?"
42:04
And, and I was like, "Well, you should just not trust him.
42:07
If you didn't like him, if you got a bad vibe, that's gotta be enough, right?
42:10
Like, you're, you're, you're a good guy, you're of good character.
42:13
You have some sense of what's right and real and true.
42:16
Um, and if you get bad vibes from a guy, let's-" You know?
42:21
Let's trust that.
42:22
Let's, let's assume that that's a good read, that that's an honest read.
42:26
And by the same token, if you really like someone, still, still verify,
42:30
but, but do the work to invite them in.
42:32
Build bonds of hospitality, right?
42:34
Uh, I think, I think, uh, hospitality in, in the literal sense of, like,
42:39
having people over to your house and, and looking at them in the eye and
42:43
watching their kids and interacting with them, that's alway- also gonna
42:46
be just, just become really important.
42:48
Um, so, uh, if you can master bits and rhetoric, you can maintain a, you
42:53
know, a digital environment that's suitable for humans to live in.
42:56
You're sort of the, uh, the, the, the maintainer of the, the, the,
42:59
the habitat, if you will, right?
43:01
Um, and, and that, that would probably be, like a, like an honorable
43:04
position at, at, at level one.
43:06
If you've, if you've mastered those tools, you can master the content
43:09
curation, you're going to be able to create a, a protected space for the
43:14
normies, the non-AI literate people in your life to live and work and,
43:19
and, and not be just deluged with crazy, you know, internet spam, right?
43:23
Um, a- and I think we're gonna need…
43:25
One, one of the things is I, I think we're gonna need to recognize that
43:28
the people that can do that have a duty to do that, have a responsibility
43:32
to curate their worlds, have a responsibility to say, "Hey, guys.
43:36
If you wanna, if you wanna be here, the… We are a space that
43:42
doesn't, uh, that doesn't allow certain types of be- of behavior.
43:45
We are a space that says, um, we have opinions on what reality is, and you
43:52
don't get to just sort of hash out." I mean, now, if somebody comes in and
43:56
they need to kinda, like, you know, be deconditioned or whatever, right?
43:59
'Cause they, they've been in a cult, they've been gaslighted.
44:01
Hey, you know, have, have that, but don't let that affect the group.
44:05
Don't let, you know… Don't, don't have a, a situation where people can get, um,
44:10
you know, where someone can just spend a million dollars on an ad campaign or on
44:13
a, some kind of influencer campaign, and suddenly all of your people are getting
44:17
hit with, with lies that, that, that distract them, that make them go sideways.
44:22
I really think that we're gonna get to the point where it's like, hey, I
44:25
just kinda wanna live in the shadow of somebody that is doing the work
44:29
to figure out what's real, and their AI kind of sends out directives for
44:33
what, what narratives, what, what, what lo- thought lines to just say, "No,
44:37
we're not gonna let this in," right?
44:39
'Cause you're not gonna be able to tell what's real and what's not real.
44:42
You're gonna have to j- basically depend on, on, on a curated set
44:46
of people that are, that are, that are doing the work there.
44:48
Okay?
44:48
So that's level one.
44:49
Uh, so level two, uh, we, we might put toget- put out a, another fork.
44:52
You might do manufacturing or farming, right?
44:55
Agriculture.
44:56
So manufacturing is when you apply your skill to the physical environment, right?
45:00
Controlling robots on a manufacturing floor or some other,
45:03
you know, bounded environment.
45:04
Um, this path is more long-term.
45:06
It takes more capital.
45:07
It shows how you have handled efficiency.
45:09
Uh, I think one of the interesting things about manufacturing, uh, you know, in
45:11
these bounded systems is you probably can actually get the human out of the loop.
45:17
Right?
45:18
If you have the same robots and you have the same box and you're producing
45:21
the same thing consistently, right?
45:23
Then until you need to change that, you probably can develop an AI system that
45:27
can just run it while you're gone, right?
45:29
I mean, one of the, one of the questions will be, I mean, will, will
45:32
humans be involved in manufacturing, like, at all, aside from sending
45:36
in, "Hey, we want new things."
45:37
So you have product development.
45:39
But once the product has been developed, um, it's… I think there's a very
45:42
real world where in 10, 20 years, really the only place that humans get
45:47
directly involved is, uh, obviously if something goes wrong, but to kind
45:50
of more at the financial level, making bets, saying, "Hey, we think demand
45:53
is gonna go this way or that way."
45:55
I think that's a very real possibility.
45:57
The other level too is, is farming, right?
45:59
Robots moving across open country, autonomous tractors,
46:03
the agricultural lasers we talked about in earlier episodes,
46:05
defensive drone swarms over fields.
46:07
I know parenthetically that there's a lot of overlap, between, drones defending
46:12
a field from flies or mosquitoes or, other kind of, bugs and pests and
46:17
larger, more military applications, This path is more short-term.
46:20
You get faster feedback.
46:21
It shows how well you handle living creatures.
46:22
You'll be able to kind of track how stressed are the cows every
46:25
time the drone buzzes over, right?
46:27
Um, and, and it's unclear how high capital this will be.
46:30
Um, a- and I think there's… The, the early indications are that
46:35
this will be easier to do other places in the United States, right?
46:38
Latin America appears to be the place where we're gonna work this out.
46:41
That's where Peter Thiel is, is going.
46:42
He's trialing his, his early AI, you know, ventures on this topic in,
46:47
um, in Paraguay, I believe, um, or somewhere else in Latin America, right?
46:53
So when you've done that level two work, you could probably start to
46:55
design, you know, AI workflows.
46:56
And again, I think there… that means understanding where
46:59
the human in the loop goes.
47:00
So I think a lot of what command is, is knowing where having a human
47:05
in the loop to make a decision on trained instinct dramatically reduces
47:08
the token cost and, and the time even of the most capable models.
47:12
Um, so that, that, that's probably where, where I, I would
47:15
say level two kinda tops out.
47:17
Then we get to level three, which is your, your, your public service, your
47:20
medical, your police, your military.
47:22
Um, you're applying the core skills from lower levels to situations involving
47:26
people, some degree of violence, surgical and casualty evacuation robotics,
47:30
protective drone work, I mean, in, in the military context, drone defense and,
47:34
and, and then drone attack obviously.
47:36
Um- Now interestingly, at that level you still have to persuade people and defend
47:41
decisions, so rhetoric comes back around.
47:43
And, and I think this, this is the step that's gonna require some level
47:46
of public or official gatekeeping.
47:48
It, it, it, it carries and it should carry, um, a, a pretty heavy
47:51
character test because human lives are at stake with every decision.
47:55
Um, and then when you master that level, you're, you're really talking
47:58
about somebody who has … who is an AI paladin, who has an enormous amount of
48:02
skill, an enormous amount of e- economic impact, and, and I think he's gonna
48:06
be qualified for h- for high office.
48:08
Uh, probably before, um, he, he does that, you're, you're gonna need to, um,
48:14
you're gonna need to give him charge.
48:15
This … If you, if you have somebody that's gonna be defending critical
48:17
infrastructure, nuclear power plants, um, you know, water infrastructure,
48:22
all of that stuff, you're gonna need somebody who has incredible skill in all
48:27
of these underlying technologies, and, and who is motivated, who is trustworthy,
48:31
who has a stake in the system.
48:33
Um, you know, this is, this is somebody who is e- equivalent to the consul,
48:37
somebody who's climbed and now commands, um, you know, the, the, the, the
48:41
core technologies of the day, right?
48:44
A- another thing that I think that the AI paladins will, will be necessary
48:48
for is hunting those bad actors, right?
48:50
I, I said earlier, things are going to get dystopian if we do
48:53
not update our social structures for the powers we have released.
48:56
Um, and, and again, I think that's gonna happen.
48:58
And I think it'll happen not necessarily on a society-wide level, but I think
49:03
it will happen on a corporate level, on a city level, on a community level.
49:06
There will be certain, you know, countries that really do, certain states, right?
49:10
Uh, we just, you know, heard, heard today there's a town in Illinois that
49:13
has, has declared itself to be a, a Flock safety town, which basically
49:17
means as near as they can make it, every square inch of their town is under Flock
49:22
surveillance, right, that's outside.
49:24
Uh, you know, public property, private property, like the, the, the, the
49:28
level of intrusion, uh, that they are proclaiming to the whole world that
49:33
they have of these Flock cameras, uh, I mean, I, it's not attractive to me.
49:37
I wouldn't live there.
49:38
But we'll, we'll see kind of what that, what that leads to.
49:41
And again, I, I think it'll lead to some really bad outcomes.
49:44
I think there's gonna be… The- people do not understand that they are creating
49:47
a throne upon which a, an actual human person with real interests and real
49:53
desires which will not always align with you is gonna sit, and they're gonna
49:57
make decisions to benefit them, right?
49:59
And if you're on the wrong side of them, um, they're…
50:03
That- that's gonna become really hard and really bad.
50:05
And if you're on the right side of them, you're probably gonna be able to get away.
50:08
There's gonna be enormous corruption.
50:10
These, these guys are going to help their friends and, uh, and hurt
50:14
their enemies and, and, uh, if you're not prepared for that, if you…
50:17
A- again, there's, there's nothing inherently dystopian
50:20
about these technologies.
50:21
It doesn't have to be used this way.
50:23
You could have someone that we say, "Hey, let's have a serious, you know, social
50:26
conversation about what kind of person we want to sit in that throne." And if
50:32
we spent five, 10 years, uh, earnestly seeking that person, I'm very confident
50:37
we could figure out who that guy would be, reward him appropriately, set up
50:40
proper accountability structures, and the system would work pretty well, okay?
50:45
But that's not what we're gonna do, so you're gonna get some really bad
50:48
outcomes, and then there's gonna be backlash against the technology.
50:50
It's gonna kind of go back and forth.
50:51
And my prediction is that what's gonna solve that is these high-level actors
50:56
that, that master the technology, that really know what's going on,
51:00
um, and they're able to come in and, and deal with the problem.
51:05
They're able to come into a corporation and figure out, hey, somebody is
51:09
using AI to hack the system to get themselves promoted higher faster
51:14
than they should, to blackmail people.
51:16
Uh, some- somebody in Flock cameras is blackmailing the mayor or the, the, the,
51:20
the, the police chief of the town because he has evidence on camera of their affairs
51:25
or their, you know, whatever, whatever it is that these people are doing, right?
51:28
Um- And so you're gonna need an AI paladin who has the technical skill to come
51:33
in, beat whatever encryption, undo, you know, anything AI can do, AI can undo.
51:38
Um, go in, say, "Okay, this is really what we think happened," and deal with it.
51:43
Um, so I think, I think that- that's what you'll need before you give a
51:46
man charge of defending the critical infrastructure of such a place.
51:48
And as soon as we have a group of people like that, I think that they're gonna
51:52
immediately, if they do well, if they save a town or, or a company when that
51:56
town had kind of gone culty and dystopian, those guys are gonna be incredibly
52:00
politically powerful and influential.
52:02
A- and that's a good thing, That's actually what we want.
52:05
So as I wind up here, you know, order is a cultural choice.
52:08
I gave these, these different levels, these alternate pathways that…
52:11
Because I think that's probably what it'll look like initially.
52:13
I think long term, the, the culture will probably pick one idealized order
52:18
of the levels, and that order, you know, will be related to what the,
52:21
the, the, the polity values, right?
52:23
Rome's military first order declared Rome a city of soldiers, right?
52:26
Uh, the Virginia cursus honorum was about producing farmers, high quality farmers.
52:30
The British gentry was about producing financiers, um, of a sort.
52:35
Uh, so, so we're still kind of figuring out what it is that, that
52:37
we care about, um, on, on this level.
52:40
but that's, that's where, that's where I think it'll go.
52:42
Um, I, I also wanna, again, emphasize, you know, both Rome and Virginia placed
52:46
a very high premium on leaders who could effectively manage lower IQ people in
52:51
military and agricultural environments.
52:53
Um, our culture these last 100, 150 years has massively downplayed that skill set.
52:57
You'll talk to people who don't think it's even possible to really model, for a
53:01
high IQ person to model low IQ behavior.
53:04
Um, uh, you know, I, I was trained by my grandfather.
53:07
Um, and I… It, it's, it's just a skill.
53:10
It's like any other.
53:11
You can develop it.
53:12
You can get good at it.
53:13
Um, if you're high IQ, you are perfectly capable of developing mental
53:17
models for how low IQ people think, what they want, how to motivate them
53:21
effectively, how to work with them well.
53:23
It's not that difficult, guys.
53:25
so it's entirely possible that we will and, and probably we should, uh,
53:28
put, put something that, that, that reintroduces that back as a feeder
53:31
game right at the beginning of, of a cursus honorum of the AI future.
53:34
Um, now I'll, I'll acknowledge we have AI models and that might
53:39
substitute in part kind of the way the medieval cultures judged a house by
53:42
the horses that it bred and trained.
53:44
Um, but I still suspect that dealing with people who are not AI capable, who are
53:48
not… who, who need to be managed by AI rather than are capable of managing
53:52
AI, I think that'll be a core skill.
53:54
Um, I think that'll be something that we're s- we're, we're doing
53:56
for the foreseeable future, right?
53:58
Um, I also think that financial ability will, will matter
54:01
alongside the skill domains.
54:03
I, I didn't put that in, uh, uh, in par- in the direct ladder because I think
54:07
that AI and cryptocurrency will reinforce each other and they'll create something
54:11
that's materially new and I don't really know what that'll look like, right?
54:14
We're, we're seeing this with the Zero Human company which uses, you
54:17
know, jewels e- effectively as a currency for paying its AI agents.
54:21
Um, it's entirely possible that we will require people to
54:24
build their own AI economies.
54:26
You know, tuning individual agents and system-wide incentives until
54:29
a stable economy emerges, right?
54:30
People have done that in, in, in video games.
54:33
I think, um, you know, RuneQuest famously at one point.
54:36
Uh, the, the… one of the chief coders in RuneQuest, um, won an award and, and I
54:41
think a knighthood or something like that from the British, uh, the British Crown
54:44
for demonstrating that you could with 20,000 people create a stable currency.
54:49
I heard him talk about it on a podcast once and, and, and he had this hilarious
54:52
comment about something to the effect of, you know, "I, I, uh, I went and
54:56
took this knighthood that I'd gotten and I went and tried to talk to all
54:58
the economists that advi- advise politicians on how you could create
55:02
stable currencies and after about a year I figured out that no one in politics was
55:06
interested in creating stable currencies
55:08
Uh, which is, which is exactly the problem that we're facing, right?
55:11
But I think that, you know, the fact that that was a thing that a guy… I
55:14
mean, he basically just tried to do that.
55:16
His government asked him, "Hey, could you try and make a stable currency
55:19
that you don't have to constantly adjust?" Um, and so he tried.
55:22
He was a talented software developer, you know, a tier one software developer
55:26
but he wasn't, he wasn't a superhuman and he was able to do that with, uh,
55:30
with, uh, with his, his video game that he was, that he was running.
55:34
Um, so it's entirely possible.
55:35
We'll just… that'll be one of the things you're required to do.
55:37
Like, that'll be your, your standard high school project.
55:40
You just gotta do this.
55:40
Uh, and, you know, and again, I don't know what that'll look like
55:43
or what the specific technology will be so I don't know kind of where
55:46
in the, in the ranks that'll occur.
55:48
, But competitions between those economies and then, you know, maybe even joining
55:51
the real financial markets at a certain point might become some kind of
55:55
coming of age ceremony or some marker that you've achieved a certain tier.
55:58
Again, I, I, so as I said earlier, I think manufacturing may become so commoditized
56:02
that in 20 years there really aren't any humans in the loop in the direct of, uh,
56:06
manufacturing economy, and it's all we're just kind of dealing with the financial
56:10
incentives at a layer above that.
56:12
One of the points that, that I do wanna emphasize before we wind up is I think
56:15
we, we need to understand that in the AI era, you will constantly be producing
56:19
artifacts, digital creations that can live on someone's hardware, right?
56:23
Um, and those, those artifacts will be y- a, a incredible evidence
56:29
of your skill at a certain thing, at a certain point in time.
56:33
And in all probability, unless you go to a, to great lengths to, like,
56:36
wipe that away, uh, those things are not, they're not gonna go away.
56:40
They're, they're gonna be on someone's computer.
56:41
Someone will be able to query them.
56:43
Someone is gonna be able to go back and, and expect, you know, the
56:45
quality of the leaf, right, for you.
56:47
Which, which, which again, it… There, there's certainly a very dystopian
56:52
way, um, for that to work its way out, but there's also a very virtuous, a
56:58
very wonderful way, a very, a very pro-social way if you work with it.
57:03
If you say, you know, "We're, we're gonna have reasonable… You know, we're
57:05
gonna have some kind of household AI so my core data gets sectioned off and
57:10
held in a, in a reasonably secure way so that people getting access to my body
57:14
of work don't get access to, you know, my teenage diaries or whatever," right?
57:18
Um, but people are able to, to, to, to make queries of, of an AI that knows
57:24
basically everything about me and, and, you know, we can develop protocols around,
57:28
you know, zero knowledge proofs and h- way to get answers to yes or no questions
57:31
without revealing any of the data that underlies them, all of that stuff.
57:34
Um, I think that there, there's a world, if we plan for, if we say, "This is a
57:39
new situation, this is a…" And now it's not an entirely new situation, right?
57:43
It's very, very similar to certain things we've done in the past, but this is
57:45
different from what we've been doing, and so we need new social management
57:49
systems to deal with that, right?
57:51
Another implication is testing as we understand it is gonna become
57:54
obsolete, and its replacement is gonna become ubiquitous and cheap, right?
57:58
Any AI in its interactions with you will very quickly determine your IQ level and,
58:02
uh, and again, a, your profile, list of interest, aptitudes, personality profiles.
58:06
AIs that do not do that will not be able to function, and again,
58:11
someone is going to have access, root level access to those chat logs.
58:16
Um, and if that person is someone that you know, you like, you trust, that has
58:21
your c- best interest at heart, that has some kind of what I would call a
58:24
covenantal relationship with you, this could be an incredibly good thing for you.
58:28
If that person is not bound by any kind of custom or laws or, or sense of
58:33
morality, won't be a good thing for you.
58:35
Okay?
58:36
So we, we have to take that seriously.
58:37
But, um, again, we know how to do this.
58:40
We… Th- this is effectively a problem of grammar, rhetoric, and leadership, right?
58:44
Code, content, and command, and we've been doing this in the West
58:48
for a very long time, um, and, and, and we know how to do it, okay?
58:53
So, uh, whoops.
58:57
So last time we asked what, what One Prime is worth.
59:00
Uh, so today I kinda went through what I, what I, the, what I think will be
59:03
the series of iterative games that can produce paladins with the high character
59:06
that those offices require or, or, you know, something similar to that, right?
59:10
Now, I, I think the credential systems will, will, will stick around.
59:14
They will keep talking, um, but I don't think they can deliver.
59:17
I think that more and more people are, are s- realizing that they can't deliver.
59:21
Again, we are creating thrones.
59:24
Someone is going to sit on those thrones and, and, and I want you all to think
59:29
about how do we work this, right?
59:32
How do we work this?
59:33
Um, how do we sto- sit back and say, "Okay, the democratic
59:37
assumptions are not gonna work.
59:39
The, the credentialing systems are not gonna work.
59:41
We need to, to say, 'We're not gonna, we're not gonna send our
59:45
kids off to, uh, university.
59:47
We are going to build from a local perspective.
59:50
We are going to raise people where they're from, and, and we're gonna
59:54
maintain relationships so that as they grow, as they, as they develop,
59:58
um, we, we, we keep the reputation.
1:00:01
We keep going back to what is your foundation?
1:00:04
Where do you come from?
1:00:05
Have you been able to demonstrate, as you grow and develop in skill, have you been
1:00:09
able to demonstrate consistent character, and are you, uh, are you integrated with
1:00:14
a series of, of things so that it will matter if your reputation is ruined?'"
1:00:18
Right?
1:00:19
Um, th- the answer to that is, is that that's what the cursus honorum is, right?
1:00:22
It's this series of games that you grow into, and you get higher
1:00:25
and higher, and at every level, you're demonstrating character.
1:00:28
That's the primary thing you're doing.
1:00:29
So, That concludes, my prepared remarks, so we are going to enter the Q&A.
1:00:36
Thank you, everybody, for, for sticking with me for a little bit longer.