So a lot of this depends on how much you trust these people. I never can figure out you know whether Sam is afraid of AGI or happy that we will see AGI in our lifetime.

Yeah, I think it’s quite…

So to Manhattan Projects, or you could think of it as an Oppenheimer moment, like where you realize that there’s this choke point, there’s one design company and three production companies, and if you could just get them to do something, then we could build a defense into the infrastructure. ...

Call it uranium.

And part of the discussion has been a question of, do we have to embed code in the chips to enable governance on the chip? And what would the legal authority be to enable that? In the United States, this is a general discussion that’s been happening. And even there, ...

Yeah, maybe. Maybe two years at the most.

Yeah, I’ve been working with Aza and Tristan, interested in a lot in the security dimension, And also, if you think about the AGI threat, and a relatively short time horizon to address it.

But figuring out who are the people who can make that transformation occur and deploy it is a hard thing in the United States because it’s politically polarized. and it’s not clear who in the administration would do something like that.

So the point is that the legal system in the United States is teed up to block any effective response to these threats, which is why I think the critical thing that’s gonna happen here is that once you succeed, to whatever level you succeed, then that success needs to ...

I’m very supportive of aggressive regulations in the TikTok context. But already, with, for example, the crudest regulation in Montana, where they banned it, already they’ve been challenged with a First Amendment lawsuit. And all of these– but the point is that these lawsuits take five years to resolve. And ...

So in states, I mean, it’s one thing to worry about cyber security and banking fraud. Once you talk about elections, then it’s a free speech issue. And it’s not clear that they have the courage to really step into that space.

Unless there’s a constitutional barrier.

Is anything like that happening in the States?

And so that you’ve deployed now measures that you think will succeed in achieving security?

And the Chinese attack against this election, are you terrified of that?

Yeah, critical ones. Yeah, yours is next, right?

Yeah, it’s quite amazing, and it’s terrifying because it hasn’t been picked up enough inside of the States but I think we need a number of these very clear, demonstrative examples of its success. And then that can begin to spread more quickly. Because the alternative, regular democracy, everybody sees ...

I have a friend who has just become the mayor of the city of Denver. And he was expressing a really strong desire to find a way to experiment with polis inside of some of the issues that Denver is dealing with. Is there a mechanism that’s available to people ...

Who is that?

Are there places in the States that have been interested in adopting this Polis architecture and facilitate?

So it’s quite exact to an existing archive.

So, this was of course then set up as a venture funds project, but then we took the same technology and she’s now trying to deploy it in public context so that it can be used in a very low cost way to facilitate the same kind of deliberative stuff. ...

Yes, right. And over the course of a relatively short period of time, with a very diverse group of people, it identified where the investment should be. So they ran these tests. And the success of the investments was two times the success of the investments in regular venture capitalists. ...

It was originally developed in the context of venture capitalists. And the idea was, how could we identify investments that are going to be profitable? And so the way this technology works is it’s essentially texting questions to people. And people give responses. And then the AI is able to ...

So she was way back at the beginning of Java, one of the leaders at Java. And then she’s moved through a number of companies. But the most recent, she’s starting a group called Common Good AI. And they have this really powerful technology which is polis-like.

Yeah, I think that’s exactly the right strategy. So like multiplying the number of ways that we can break democracy into very practical peer-to-peer relations is the correct thing. So Polis is obviously a great technology. Did you ever get to know Kim Polese?

She lives two streets over from me.

But California is one example. Is there anyone else that you have had contact with?

They’re pretty good.

And do you have any examples of states that are doing that in the United States?

Congress is a broken institution. The administration is increasingly limited by the courts. So when you have relations to the United States government about what it should be doing, what’s your read about how well they’re carrying that through?

But you have an advantage with a relatively small country, super smart people in government who understand how to respond and engage. There’s no equivalent in the United States. I mean, there are smart people in the government in the United States, but there’s no equivalent governance capacity in the ...

So what do we do in a world where we’ve got these super smart algorithms that can achieve instrumental rationality towards some objective that has nothing to do with the underlying truth?

Yeah, and on TikTok, it amplifies American voices that say things like: “Yes, of course, this makes sense, China traditionally held this position over Taiwan.” And then it suppresses American voices that says “Taiwan is the victim here and China is the aggressor.” So that there’s no fake speech. There’s ...

Okay, but those are particular cases where we can all agree that there is a harm. Let’s take a particular problem: Imagine China invades Taiwan tomorrow.

But the problem is the management overruled every one of their decisions, and there’s no legal infrastructure to hold anybody accountable in that sense. Because, you know, obviously we have no regulation. And so I just wondered, like, what are we gonna do to create a different set of accountable ...

Well, so if you look at what we could call, what Tristan calls “first contact,” which is the social media story, inside of Facebook there were a lot of really excellent engineers who were pushing back strongly against what Facebook was doing to try to build an environment of safety.

I want you to tell me what I should take back to the United States so that we can begin to do something about democracy that could help us respond.

I told Ching-Yi I wanted to come to Taiwan because I wanted to–

No, that’s why I came here.

Right, and we’re even backing away from that.

We haven’t– we’ve been taken over by the corporations in America because of their corruption of the political funding system. So they neutralized our ability to resist them. So why do we have any faith that we will have any better capacity against the AI, which will be smarter and ...

Yeah, so I think we’re terrified. But it’s a particular example of a more general problem, which is do we have a capacity to govern in the face of AI? And one way to answer that is do we have the capacity to govern in the face of another instrumental ...

Precision cloggers, that’s a nice way to put it.

In this election cycle. I mean, the United States is in a terrible position about this, has no governing capacity to respond. And I think China in particular is going to deploy resources…

Well, basically, AI will end democracy.

Oh yeah!

I think you’re – are you – yeah, no, you’re after me.

Great, wonderful.

Average, yeah. I’m eager for this tea to have its effect.