YouSaid · the spoken record

David Runciman

lines on the record: 63
first: 2024-01-08
most recent: 2024-01-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Where there is a real threat to us. The state, more than the corporation, I mean, I still would put my money on the state rather than alphabet or meta to save us all. The state with all its faults is our tool for keeping us safe in a world in which it is almost also the most dangerous thing. Cognitive dissonance that we've lived with for hundreds of years and in the nuclear age is so extreme that most of us can't bear to think about it for more than 10 seconds because our heads in, that is the human condition. That is what it means to be human in the 21st century to know that the thing that can keep us safe is also the thing that might kill us all. And I don't think we've moved beyond that in the age of ChatGPT. We may at some point move beyond that, but for now I still think that terrible dilemma is our dilemma.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We fall back on them for our security. I still don't think that has changed. If these machines really are Threat to us Then I think it is those other machines that we built earlier that will have to save us. I don't think we can do it without them. But that does mean reconciling ourselves to all of that, both clumsy, cumbersome features. Democracy is a clumsy tool. It could be improved. I still feel, as I felt when I wrote that book, that what we call democracy is just one way of doing it. And there are a hundred ways of doing it. And we could definitely use this technology to be more imaginative in how we use democracy. I still think we gave up way too early on the dream of the 1990s of a kind of e-democracy. Let's have more human inputs in this way of doing politics using this technology to provide the conduit for those inputs. So I still think we could do it in a hundred different ways, but nonetheless, we have to accept that”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, yeah, of course, everyone's views change all the time and the emergence of the latest versions of this technology are extraordinary at the age of this year has been an extraordinary year. I mean, ChatGPT didn't exist this time last year and new and better versions are coming along all the time. And it does change a lot of how one thinks about the world. as I do work in a university you find yourself thinking about all sorts of fundamental questions what is education going to be what is writing going to be what the most prosaic level what is assessing other people's writing going to be how will we know who's written what all of that but that basic point that in this world we are still in a story which is recognizably a story and i i felt in the age of covid we saw this very clearly a story that has its roots hundreds of years ago we built these security delivering machines which are clumsy and cumbersome and”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A man like him ultimately can overcome, but it just slightly freaks me out at the thought that a democracy would re-elect him. That's all I would say. I didn't sort of think that that was a possibility. I thought he was, I thought he might be re-elected to a second term, but I didn't think he would be kicked out and then re-elected. So we'll see about that. But on the wider question.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one thing that has changed since how democracy ends is in that book, I basically begin by saying Donald Trump is not the end of democracy. And when Biden won and Trump lost and then Trump did leave office reluctantly, dragged out by his fingernails, but he left, I thought indeed. He gets re elected, I'm less sanguine, is all I would say. So I had thought for a while that he wasn't the end of democracy. I still think the institutions actually of the American state are way more robust than...”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are just machines. So let's rebuild them. And I don't know when we gave up on that. It doesn't require revolution. It doesn't require sort of blood in the streets, although it might. I have no idea, right? But what it does require is political ambition. Take seriously the thought that what is human made can be human remade. And that is the promise of modern politics. And I still think we're in the story of modern politics, not postmodern politics, not post-human politics. And in the story of modern politics, what is human-made can be remade by human beings using the smartest tools available? And for now, the smartest tool available is still our collective intelligence. So let's do that.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you could say there's a similar anxiety about states and corporations, but the difference is it's really hard to understand them, but it's not important. I mean, I say they are black boxes in a way, and even people who work for states and corporations often don't understand how they reach the decisions they do. But I would be more hopeful that it's possible at least to get enough understanding of how they work to re-engineer them, to serve our interests again. We are not yet with states and corporations at the point where we have completely lost control over them because they are such smart systems. They are incredibly complex systems. But we are still smarter than they are. And maybe with AIs, we'll be even smarter than they are. The mistake, I think, is to think, let's either re-engineer the humans or re-engineer the actual robots and let the states and corporations carry on almost as though they were the natural entities. They are the least natural entities in the world.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we've got the sort of balance of risk wrong and also the balance of possibility wrong. I don't know whether these new smart machines are going to provide us human beings with resources, and they might. They might provide us with the resources to re-engineer the corporations because they're smarter than the corporations. Human intelligence plus artificial intelligence might be just what we need to build a new world of corporate governance that actually works in human interest. I just don't know. But even in the absence of that, human beings could still try harder to re-engineer these things because they are just machines. We built them. We built them to serve us. And one of the parallels that I draw in the book is we had this anxiety about AI. What if we build machines that we lose control over because they are so much smarter than us? And so we can't anymore understand how they work. So we can't re-engineer them. And they become self-represented. And they swallow us all up.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that world, the obvious thing to do would be to re-engineer those corporations. For instance, if we thought that 70% of carbon emissions was the responsibility of 100 robots, Actual robots, you know, they were these huge things lumbering around the world. We would think the number one priority would be to get inside those robots and rewire them. So that's what we should do, and yet there's a fatalism around that is to complicate it, it's too hard, you know, it would have to happen through the state. Yes, it would. So we'd have to probably elect people on those kind of platforms and we would have to take that seriously as a project, which we don't because democratic politics tends to revolve around more immediate issues that grab people's attention. But nonetheless...”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know enough about these machines yet to know what they're capable of, but re-engineering corporations is easy, right? You can redesign them, you can re-regulate them, you can re-engineer them, the legal corporate governance structure in which they work, because that's what they are. They are just algorithms. You just change the functionings to make them... Produce different outcomes. And we've given up on that. So in the book, I say, and it's one of those statistics that I wouldn't want to sort of defend in a court of law. I read it and I sort of checked it, but it's a useful shorthand. But it's roughly that 70% of carbon emissions are the direct or indirect responsibility of 100 corporations.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Build ones that are going to be really helpful for us. And yet the real fatalism is around particularly the corporate agents kind of, well, modern corporations just are what they are. They are these kind of greedy profit-driven planet-consuming machines. The fossil fuel companies are listening to a radio phone in this morning about the latest thing coming out of the COP. And all of the people who are calling in, and this wasn't some sort of rabble-rousing show, this was Radio 2 in the BBC. This is about as middle of the road as you can get. Now, this is the vanilla version of all of this. And everybody was kind of, yeah, well, it's just words. We all know the corporations will carry on doing what they do. So it strikes me that we just kind of got this the wrong way around, right? Reengineering human beings is hard. Re-engineering the AIs, it may be hard. It may not be hard. I don't know. It's way above my pay grade. And I don't think...”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe we need to re-engineer human behavior. That is, human beings have got to behave differently, which strikes me as a very ambitious project. It's very ambitious to expect human beings to behave differently from how they behave, just let's say for the past couple of hundred years. We live in a world where our behavior is conditioned by structures which do prioritize economic growth. To get us to change is going to be hard. not least because we've become used to certain kinds of comforts and conveniences. And I just, you know, maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but changing human behavior is hard. We also think that we maybe with these new smart machines, if we can engineer them right, set them up right, they can provide these amazing resources to help us think through these challenges. And these machines are somehow malleable or fungible. Because we build them, maybe we can...”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'd say a couple of things about that. And I think climate change is an interesting example here because... One of the things that strikes me about how we talk about what we can do and what we can't do. And I think we're all aware that we live in a political age which is characterized by quite a lot of anger, but also quite a lot of fatalism. There's a lot of talk about... That's just the way it is, including around climate change. There's an awful lot of fatalism around climate change. But what struck me is... There is an emphasis on if we're going to do something about this.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know what mechanism we have that are designed to give us control over ChatGPT, but I do know that we have mechanisms that are designed to give us control over OpenAI via The United States government. I mean, I'm not a U.S. citizen, so I don't have that much control, but U.S. citizens do, we shouldn't give up on those channels of control or at least influence. But if we just think it's us against the robots, we've got to make the robots ethical so that they don't treat us badly, we miss out the key players. And the key players are these hybrid entities that are, they are more human, actually, than the coming age of machines because they are made of us.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we just think it's human versus artificial, I think we misunderstand it. The choice we make is, I think I put it more or less like this at the end of the book, what kind of artificiality do we want to live with? And I still would pin a lot of hopes on the state, actually, as the one that in this story... We can exercise the most control over because A, we know these things better, we understand the better, we've lived with them for longer. B, they aren't smarter than we are. They just aren't, right? They're stupider than we are in many ways. So let's find ways that we can pool our collective intelligence. We understand them. They're not smarter than us, but also we have lots of mechanisms, structures that are designed to give us control over them.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We should try and re-emphasize and reclaim the human side of it, including, I think, against this danger that it will become artificial plus artificial against the human. But to see that, I think you have to recognize the ways in which this isn't just a human versus artificial story. So at the end of the book, I say we face a series of choices, but they are basically about how you fit together three things, not two things. There's us, there's the artificial agents who run our world that we've been living with for a couple of hundred years, and there is the new breed of thinking, machine learning entities, not yet quite thinking.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Until we reach actual AI, search engines are made of us, right? Google, the reason Google works is because of the human inputs. Some of them have bought inputs now, but mainly human inputs. The reason the state works is because of the human inputs. But there's a danger that the state will franchise out decision-making. So those human inputs get more and more distant from the decisions.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These decisions will not be entirely remote and impersonal, and then we have democratic structures to try and hold them to account. But those states might then franchise out decision-making to machine learning systems in the name of efficiency. And then you're getting quite a long way away from the human. And in that conversation, I think we should resist the temptation to think the state is the inhuman thing. We should remember the state is part inhuman and part human. It does still depend on us. We give it its intelligence. And it is still ostensibly at least made of us. It's a sort of machine in the same way that...”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It better, if it's just human versus the machine, those machines win. So there is always that going on. But there's another danger, I think a new danger, which I try and highlight towards the end of the book, which is these bureaucratic corporate political machines, they do have their own imperatives. They are not human and they don't have as rich an understanding of the world that we live in as we do because they're not intelligent. And one of the things they tend to prioritize is efficiency. They're looking for efficiencies. And these new smart machines, which also aren't yet particularly intelligent, are very good at delivering potentially efficiencies. And so there is at least a risk that these two kinds of machines will sort of form an alliance against us. And we're already starting to see a bit of that. The state, we franchise out decision-making to the state because we think”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's tempting to despair of the mechanistic, the bureaucratic side of modern political and economic life. And it also, it is one of the drivers of the reaction against contemporary democratic politics. I find the word populism is not always particularly helpful, but it's a good shorthand for what I'm talking about. People are really frustrated with the inhuman qualities of these complex, incredibly involved systems that rule our world. And it is not easy, but it's certainly possible for human beings to come along and promise to be the human version. And the more human these people are, and I would include Donald Trump in this, who strikes me as a very human politician, the greater their appeal. Their appeal is against the machine. But it's also completely ridiculous because the only way to do anything in this world is to know how the machine works and to be able to run.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they aren't just that. And we always have to remember they aren't just that. The blob also contains human beings. And you can, if you look hard enough, you can usually find them and you can find the humans behind the... Impersonal machine just as you can find the impersonal machines behind the humans. It's always a two way thing. And I think”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question, not easy to answer. I mean, I think we're all aware, and we use this language, and I think we tend to think of our use of it as metaphorical, but it's not entirely metaphorical. The bureaucratic machine, the machinery of state, the machinery of government, and it has this kind of grinding thoughtless quality. We've all encountered not just political but corporate and other entities that feel like a machine out of control. They grind human beings down. not just in a sort of Kafkaesque nightmarish sense, but just in a regular, the day-to-day interactions with these entities in their complexity, in their strength as well. You feel like a human being when you encounter the bureaucracy, the blob, as it's sometimes called in the UK, you feel like you've encountered an unthinkable, stifling sort of blanket that's just swamping you.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“company that produces unusual outcome that actually then produced a revolt against that unusual outcome and a restructuring of the company. And people often think, well, that can't be the interesting part of the story. Surely the interesting part of the story is are the robots going to eat us all for breakfast? No, the interesting part of the story is are the corporations going to eat us all for breakfast because if it happens, it will be because of the way that corporations are structured. And that seemed to me a really good example of that. But it's a hard sell because to be honest, corporate governance isn't as sexy as Killer Robots. But the killer robots here are the corporations.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That question means nothing if you don't have an account of how it passes through the decision making structure of these vast monstrous entities that rule our world. And we don't spend enough time talking about that. And just to give one example very briefly, but it's the one that's sort of in my mind, the recent sort of hoo-ha about open AI and Sam Altman and all of that. And it's often been written up as a sort of philosophical argument about AI and there are the people within AI within OpenAI who have these ethical concerns that these machines are going to destroy humanity. Big concern. And then there are the sort of Sam Altmans who want to make money out of them. And it's a sort of philosophical debate between, but that story was about corporate governance. I mean, that was what that was about. It was about the structure of the Open AI board. None of that story makes sense unless you understand it was a weirdly structured.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any answer to that question has to pass through our understanding of how states and corporations control these machines. So if we think these machines are terrible or they need to be better regulated or they need to be made more moral, say often boards of ethicists are convened to work out how to build AIs that aren't going to kill us all.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Came up with brilliant ideas and hit these machines as a result. I mean, it's now a cliched part of the story. The American military industrial complex produced the infrastructure on which the digital revolution was built. And without the investment of the American state, and now the investment of the Chinese state, usually driven by security concerns, almost always spending on that scale can only be done by states and can only be done by states that have existential fears about their survival under conditions of war. So the Cold War and now the new Cold War between the US and China is driving much of the investment that's producing these revolutions in artificial intelligence. So states and corporations are the building blocks of these things. And the question I feel that gets neglected in all of the chatter about what will these new thinking machines do to us is”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But how does artificial intelligence relate to artificial agency, which is what we've been living with for hundreds of years. And I think that the key thing is that these artificial agents run our world, and that means they also run the world into which these AIs are emerging. Secondly, these AIs aren't just like emerging in the wild, like, you know, they haven't been given birth to by creatures that have gone off and produced them. They have been given birth to by state.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the mistakes I think that it's easy to make when thinking about AI is just to get preoccupied with the relationship between the latest machines and the humans. And I think the I in AI encourages that because it suggests that the key question about AI is how does its intelligence, whatever it is, relate to other kinds of intelligence, particularly almost exclusively human intelligence. I've heard fascinating talks comparing AI with how plants think or trees and lots of interesting, really interesting work that's done on how children think, very, very young children and so on. Still human intelligence, but it's not. But that's only one question. And my book is about the other thing, which I think is neglected, which is how do the A's relate to each other? So it's not how does artificial intelligence relate to other kinds of intelligence.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's nothing that I've seen that's happening now that doesn't feel to me that it's not still recognizably part of this history, not least because, as I said a bit earlier, there is a sequence here. So there are parallels. I think there are interesting philosophical, political, parallels between these different kinds of agents. And a lot large part of my book, particularly the first part, is trying to tease us out so that when we talk about AI, we can see some of the parallels. But the sequence is just as important. And the sequence is there are human beings. Human beings built artificial versions of themselves, which I call states and corporations. It's a kind of shorthand because some of these are complex and don't quite neatly fit in those categories, but I call them states and corporations. They built artificial versions of themselves to do things that human beings can't do. It was a very successful sort of experiment, which turned into a way of life. And now those things are building the next generation of machines.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in a way, that would be my first answer, which is simply to agree with you, it does fit into this story because you will often hear from the more sort of boosterish elements of Silicon Valley that We're starting again. We're entering a new phase of the human story and a lot of this is new. So at the most basic level, one of the things my book is trying to do is just to try to remind people there is a history here and history matters in this story. And we are still in this story. So it's not like there's history, which is this quaint antiquarian thing. And then ChatGPT comes along and history is over and we're in the next thing.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“States for a couple of centuries in parts of Asia for 50, 70 years, in some parts of the world more recently than that. Still in that world, but we might be near the end of it.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies in conjunction with the super smart machines that they're building, these new AIs, it can somehow take us past and beyond the state because you'll almost be able to live your whole life on Google, Alphabet, Meta, the metaverse, whatever it is. That's not the East India Company version, but there's always in the age of AI, in the last 10, 15, 20 years, been this kind of promise of a post-political world where somehow the clunky old analog Hobbesian lumbering Frankenstein's robot gets left behind by this sleek new alliance between powerful corporations as economic agents allied with these smart machines. We're not there yet. We've left the East India Company world behind. We're not in that brave new world. We're still in the recognizable world which has run in Europe and the United States.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Human relationships between the people who run the states and run the corporations. So there are lots of different models of it. In the 21st century, you see different models of it around the world, the United States, state corporation relationships are very different from in China, and they are very different from in Europe and the European Union. But they are all still within the same broad universe, which is not the East India Company version. When Facebook, as it was then called, wanted to have its own currency, the US Treasury said no. Not in a million years are you having your own currency. We do that, like the dollar is the linchpin of our ability to provide security, among other things, you do what you do. So it's not the East India Company version. And nor is it some futuristic version, which we'll probably come onto, where these corporations, they don't do traditional state functions, but the thought that some of the big tech companies”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over the course of a couple of decades it explodes, and you see that pattern repeating itself. And it's repeating itself in many places. In South Korea. Life in South Korea in the 1950s was not that different from life in terms of basic economic measures. Life in South Korea in the 1350s. Life in South Korea now is like another universe and its economic growth that's driven it and its state doing security, corporation doing economic innovation and prosperity, but they work together. And in the South Korean case, you see them working together quite”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spark of what we have seen repeat itself throughout the world in the modern age, which is explosive economic growth. And it happens in different places at different times. So relatively recently in places like India, really only since the 1990s, China since the 1970s, in the United States, the 1820s, in France, the middle of the 19th century Germany, later in the 19th century, first of all probably in England, in Britain at the end of the 18th century, something happens where these two things exist alongside each other but do different things. They take their superhuman powers, but they perform different functions with them. There is this, it causes human growth to explode. And I describe it in the book as the first singularity, because if you look at the graphs that describe this, they are all hockey sticks. Human life went along a certain way for 10,000 years, 100,000 years.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Like you say, in the early part of this story, there's competition partly because the line between them is not nearly so clear. The Dutch East India Company, the British East India Company, performed lots of state-like functions. These things had armies, which corporations don't today, though they have extensive security apparatus. They don't on the whole have their own armies. They took on various state-like functions, including judicial functions. regimes of punishment and all of the rest. But over time, There's a kind of division of labor in the sense that corporations become the engines of prosperity and states become the engines of security. The line is never completely clear, that division of labor, and as you say, sort of uneasy symbiosis tends to be on my reading of history, and this is sweeping history. So, you know, there's always ways to pick holes in it. On my reading of history, that tends to be the thing that is the”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“World Ending Action that can only be done by these monsters. And therefore we have to remember for all the good they've done us, which is a lot, and not just security, you know, social democracy is built out of these things. You do not get welfare states without the state. You can't borrow, you can't organize, you can't transact on that scale. You can't do that in the ancient world. You can't do it in the medieval world. You can't do it in the early modern world. All the good they do, they are monsters.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And really latch on to those. And there is a danger with that, which is if you really humanize them, you misunderstand them. So if you think that they are, in the end, reducible to their human components, you miss what they have, which is this quality which is inhuman. And the downside of that quality is enormous destructive power beyond anything that's ever been true in human history. I mean, it is the case that, as I say in the book, if the world ends, it's these things that are going to kill us, right? Human beings are capable of ending the world, they make terrible decisions, but it's the following through on those decisions. It's the ability to turn those decisions into”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Up of human beings, the people who run governments are human beings. Joe Biden is a human being. The people who work for him are human beings. Their collective decisions are often aggregate decisions. There are lots of different ways that states have within them organizations that run very differently from states, little committees or indeed democratic organizations where collective decisions are genuinely collective. they input into a decision which is in that case the decision of the American state, which is a different kind of thing. It has a quality and artificial quality and durability that is inhuman. And it's that hybrid quality that makes them so interesting, so weird, I think we forget how weird they are. And also it's so tempting to, and I spend quite a lot of the book talking about this, it's so tempting to want to humanize them, to try and make ourselves more comfortable with them, to sort of find the human bit.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it is still made up of the inputs from our brains, our thoughts, our ideas, our hopes, our fears. It aggregates them, but it does then turn them into something other than just the sum of their parts. Once you get a state decision, it's not just then reducible to lots of individual human components. It is like an algorithm in that sense. It then produces an outcome. And as I say in the book, state outcomes are the most powerful outcomes in the world and the world changes as a result of them. The world becomes a different place once the state has decided because the state can carry the consequences of that decision far further, far longer. It's more durable than any other equivalent organization. And I think that's what makes states different. So they are this weird kind of hybrid thing. They're not completely inhuman because their human qualities do come from us and states are run by governments. Governments are made.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or whatever their equivalent is. Not yet. I don't think we were there yet. Machine learning is not artificial intelligence. Machine learning, you can still interpret in terms of the inputs, even if it produces weird and wonderful results. But with the state, I don't think we're yet at the state. I don't think we have ever been at the point where we can say this thing is really thinking for itself.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a huge literature in international relations, and there's endless arguments, philosophical, practical arguments about what's usually called realism and the idea of whether rail politique means understanding that these things called states just have their own interests, and they will act in their own interests. But I still think it is the case that even were that to be true, they don't have their own intelligence in the sense that you can't, in the case of the state, really identify an intelligence as people think we are.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I call groupthink, but the different ways in which different human interests or insights or even just intelligences can be aggregated because there are lots of collective activities which are the aggregation of what the human beings bring to them. They are aggregative. But states and corporations are not that. States and corporations are not simply the aggregation of the human beings who make them up, though we sometimes attempt to think they are, particularly in democracies. I think we sometimes hope that the state might be just all of us acting together, but it's not because it does have its own identity for sure. But to go back to the point I made at the beginning, and I think this is something that's often lost sight of, and it is one of the things I may not have emphasized it as clearly in the book as I would have liked to, which is”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question, though you did frame it as neither a question, and my answer is both. They are both aggregations of human interest and they are also the superhuman entities. And I have a chapter in the book about the different ways that you can understand philosophically and practically”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That they can't do, that's the world that we live in. And that's to me so clearly echoes the fears that we have now about the coming age of AI.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their superhuman powers. I mean, that is the crucial thing about them. They are not human. And we need to remember that because it means they can do things that we can't do. But it also means they don't have human qualities. They can do these things because they don't have a conscience. They don't have a soul. They aren't going to hell. I don't know if we are or not, but they definitely aren't. It's that kind of story in which there's always a temptation, I think, when we draw these analogies with these kinds of machines or with AIs to make it a kind of all or nothing thing. They're either going to be great or they're going to be terrible. They either like us or they're not like us. They're either human or they're not human. These things are complicated, double machines. They always do two things at the same time. Their human qualities go with their inhuman qualities. Their strengths go with their weaknesses. The things they can do, you have to run alongside the things.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a plus and a minus to all of this. It's not all good news. It's not all bad news. These things can bear burdens that are basically inhuman. I mean, the burden of total war in the modern age is an inhuman burden for anything to bear. So we put it onto an inhuman thing. The debt is the same. Corporations are similarly modeled in that they are these artificial decision-making machines onto which you can dump debts and obligations and so on. They are inhuman. But they don't have the reach of states, at least they're not meant to. Some of them have evolved to be state-like. They are designed for particular purposes, usually for particular projects. I call states in this book general artificial agents, general purpose, and corporations are more like specific purpose artificial agents, but they have those parallels in common. The crucial thing about both of them, the reason that they are so important in our lives and so dominant in our lives,”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bureaucratic forms of politics where decisions run through this mechanistic or algorithmic system. And it turns out that you can sustain debt for centuries. You can borrow far more money at lower rates of interest and then build all these other projects on the back of it. Corporations play a similar role. States and corporations, when you look at them, the most successful ones are often massively indebted. And then in the case of the state, unlike the corporation, it's also where we put moral obligations of certain kinds. So, for instance, war is one of them. The ability to sustain the killing machine of war, which individual human beings, even the most powerful ones, find hard to sustain”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has that pre modern echo in it when he makes himself an emperor. He's one of the creators of the modern state. But when he's an emperor, he wants to have a little Napoleon to follow him. The point about states is that they don't operate to a natural rhythm. So they are longer lived, potentially the successful ones. They keep going like machines as human beings come and go. And they can sustain burdens that human beings can't. And in the book, I identify two burdens in particular. The most important, actually, even though it sounds very prosaic, is debt. So states are, among other things, debt-bearing machines, and they can sustain, they can borrow and then sustain those debts for far longer than any human being can. The problem with kings is that they were always running out of money, borrowing money, couldn't pay it back. The debt was called in, the state fell apart. And that produced, among other things, the French Revolution. Then you get these modern mechanics.”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And even that phrase DNA, I'm aware that's a false analogy, right? Because they don't have DNA. So they're decision making entities. But the point of them is that they can deliver decisions to a scale and particularly to a timescale that human beings can't. So the modern state, the thing that comes out of the 17th and 18th centuries, it was a mechanism designed to solve the basic problem of politics, which is politics was too human and it was too vulnerable to the vulnerabilities of natural human beings. the number one vulnerability of all of us is that we die and politics was bedeviled by what happens with successions when kings die when emperors die all of the seething turmoil of court politics which all turns on human frailty and so much of politics pre- the modern state turned on dynastic questions marriage you know the obsession with producing an air i've just watched a terrible film napoleon but nonetheless”
2024-01-08 · Intelligence Squared · Power Grab: David Runciman on the Reach of Corporations, States and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT