Based Camp - Does AI Make Communism Feasible？ (A Far Right Debate)

00:00:00.000 hello simone today we are going to be discussing an exciting topic which is does communism make

00:00:07.160 sense now specifically what we're going to be digging into here is like we are known as i guess

00:00:12.260 far right wing youtubers or podcasters or intellectual influencers i don't know right

00:00:20.760 but people consider us far right wing now a lot of our fans consider us very centrist so

00:00:27.020 maybe but i i identify as is right wing so whatever right like i the the sane far right

00:00:33.480 is where i think i'd put us right at least within like the tech right circles and stuff like that

00:00:37.480 which puts us in an interesting position vis-a-vis communism because i'm not going to come out here

00:00:41.520 and just be like we have said in the past on the show very clearly that communism may work in a

00:00:48.520 post-scarcity economy and we have also a number of times gone into what it means when we say

00:00:56.280 something like that right where like we are putting extremely heavy caveats on this when

00:01:02.560 people have done ubi experiments and they have just handed people money they have seen extremely

00:01:09.180 bad outcomes the most famous is the sam altman one where they gave people a thousand dollars

00:01:13.240 every month for three years and the people who had been given the money they they had less money

00:01:18.360 at the end of it total money than the people who had been given nothing in terms of like wealth

00:01:22.820 increase right they they didn't spend any more time with their kids they didn't have any more

00:01:26.600 kids they didn't spend any more time in education they really only spent more time in recreation

00:01:30.220 that's it and they paid down their debt a little so that's nice

00:01:33.960 that doesn't really mean they visited the doctor a little more it doesn't really mean anything if

00:01:42.940 on net they had less money so yes they paid down their debt but on net they had less money so 1.00

00:01:50.280 just a disaster and we've seen this in communities that are offered UBI right like Native American 0.96

00:01:56.980 communities for example where we see them just completely dissolve in terms of productivity in 1.00

00:02:02.180 terms of drug addiction in terms of alcohol addiction the moment they get on something

00:02:06.860 that is the equivalent of like UBI or like local communism or something like that and so then the

00:02:12.720 question is okay how do we uh that that all being the case like also clearly ai is going to disrupt 0.71

00:02:21.740 what the economy means right and and and it may not happen this generation right it may not happen

00:02:29.400 well it's probably going to happen in our lifetimes if i'm going to be honest like if we

00:02:33.560 look at the speed of ai in relation to automated workers even even for physical labor from what

00:02:41.720 we're sort of seeing behind the scenes that's developing a lot faster than people realize and

00:02:47.300 that we may be replacing people in a lot more fields a lot faster than people think and so

00:02:52.600 then the question is okay well if that happens then what does the economy mean how do you have

00:02:59.400 a functional economy with struggle and some form of scarcity so people don't go crazy

00:03:03.940 without what we've come to understand as like market labor, right?

00:03:09.420 And so to explore this subject, I want to focus on a few areas.

00:03:15.840 I want to focus on like underlying how does capitalism help people,

00:03:23.660 examine the individual structures within capitalism

00:03:27.080 that lead to the net outcome of positive human results

00:03:29.980 and see how those can be potentially mimicked

00:03:33.820 in a post-traditionally capitalist economy but then secondarily the big question we have is

00:03:41.360 okay how does communism often fail and how could ai or even could ai realistically prevent

00:03:52.800 these failure scenarios so a classic failure scenario in communism that will sort of walk

00:03:58.260 people why communism almost always fails not almost always it literally always fails above 0.96

00:04:04.220 certain sizes communism works in small government stuff like it works with some of the kibbutzum

00:04:10.200 it works with families every family is communist i'm sorry people don't understand what i mean by

00:04:15.620 that like it's from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs

00:04:20.220 right like my baby doesn't work right and i can't produce milk for them right you know the person

00:04:26.300 who can produce milk produces the milk. The baby and the kids are not expected to bring in an

00:04:31.980 income at this stage, right? You know, but we still support them. The types of jobs and roles

00:04:36.920 that each of us take on are the types of jobs role that we're best at both due to our educational

00:04:41.560 background, proficiencies, and yes, gender. So we live in a communist structure already. We live in

00:04:46.980 a communist utopia already. It's just a very small one. But the question is, is why does it break down

00:04:51.740 at a societal level we've written extensively on this so i'll keep it pretty short uh the key

00:04:57.760 reason is is when you are creating a larger communist structure you need to centralize

00:05:08.940 power in a way that rewards bad actors and a lot of people don't they're like oh it's that people

00:05:16.600 aren't motivated when they just get money from the state or something like that or that you can't do

00:05:22.500 advanced things in a communist system and that's not true like that that's actually like factually

00:05:28.340 untrue like the one thing the soviet union was actually pretty good at was science like they

00:05:33.860 were beating us soundly in the space race for quite a long period of the space race they had

00:05:41.140 many excellent excellent scientists yes because of government bureaucracy and the way sort of power 0.98

00:05:46.260 gets captured in communist systems they also ended up making catastrophically stupid scientific 0.98

00:05:51.520 blunders that killed hundreds of millions of people the chinese did this as well this is 0.98

00:05:55.840 typically in fields like biology and and stuff like this but in in physics they did pretty well

00:06:00.540 so no it's it's actually not that people are just unmotivated in these systems a highly motivated

00:06:07.760 highly conscientious people are typically equally or if not even more motivated in communist

00:06:13.600 ecosystems where communist ecosystems really break down is for less competent fields the the average

00:06:22.020 line worker and stuff like that because at this point you don't want to do those jobs nobody wants

00:06:27.340 to do those jobs people often end up doing them at the point of a gun barrel and maliciously poorly

00:06:31.760 it's it's the average desk worker job it's not the i got my best job i could have ever gotten 0.50

00:06:39.040 because i'm literally one of the best people in the country at doing said job like i'm a gun nut

00:06:45.200 and now i get to spend all of my day coming up with gun designs and now we have the ak-47

00:06:49.920 right you know i'm a nuke nut right i'm really interested in cutting-edge nuclear technology and

00:06:55.700 now we have a soviet atomic bomb right by the way like to put in context how impressive that is

00:07:01.180 iran still can't make it admittedly like everyone's mad at them but like

00:07:06.000 the soviet union was doing this stuff like over half a century ago right at this point so

00:07:12.800 communism can actually motivate the very best to do the very best one of the problems you have

00:07:18.960 with soviet science sorry if i'm getting on a sidetrack here but they like really screwed up

00:07:23.520 their tank production for example simply because of like government politics that ended up 0.97

00:07:30.120 prioritizing one idiot's designs over the guy who is actually more competent because soviet systems 0.85

00:07:36.720 are not always good at finding the most competent person capitalist systems also struggle sometimes 0.99

00:07:44.120 to find the most competent person but generally like if the government turned me away in a

00:07:49.400 capitalist system i could presumably go and build my own company separately off of my ideas it

00:07:56.400 doesn't work that way especially not in a country like the united states like i go off and i want to

00:08:00.700 build my own tank and because somebody else has like government crony contract that they still

00:08:04.760 get the government crony contract because they're at boeing and they'll they'll kill you or something

00:08:08.440 you know that's that's the way this works but again the point i'm making here is yes sovietism

00:08:15.500 leads to catastrophic inefficiencies but you can get those within at least what we call capitalist

00:08:21.860 ecosystems as well right so now back to what the real problem of communism is so when you're going

00:08:30.420 down a communist path you essentially have two strategies that you can attempt you can say

00:08:36.420 we're going to centralize all the power into one bureaucracy and this single bureaucracy is going

00:08:43.700 to manage all forms of the economy and everything like that and everybody knows like generally this

00:08:48.980 doesn't seem to really work for a number of reasons tied to like inefficiency but we'll

00:08:54.880 put those reasons aside in a bucket for now so strategy number one centralize everything

00:09:01.500 essentially you're creating a country that's ruled by a single monopolistic company that is

00:09:08.040 that is functionally what what that form of communism is which is why i always say that

00:09:12.860 the end state of communism and the end state of extreme libertarianism are the same well i mean

00:09:17.460 a big part of this that tends to create huge huge problems is when you are creating one

00:09:24.020 when you're consolidating everything you're also abolishing private property and markets and that

00:09:32.240 people don't have the same reason to invest in their continued property and it requires a lot

00:09:37.460 of coercion like people don't just oh sure yeah take my house that's fine i didn't i mean that's

00:09:45.420 that's generally the lower bloodshed and the lower death toll is on the redistribution part

00:09:51.380 that's the step one part but i'm just saying like as a little starting point there's also some

00:09:56.380 friction obviously it involves robbing people of their property and everything like that i get that

00:10:00.620 but that's usually the lower deaths i mean a lot of obviously conservative commentators are going

00:10:04.960 to crash out about government redistribution everything like that i'm just pointing out

00:10:08.240 that's not actually where the the vast majority of communist death tolls come from the vast

00:10:12.820 majority of communist deaths come from the inefficient management that happens after that

00:10:16.680 yeah so in terms of at least there's this one book that tries to give a full a tally it's called the

00:10:21.880 black book of communism and they estimate that there have been 80 to 100 million deaths from

00:10:28.480 democide famine and repression across implementations i think famine's the biggest

00:10:33.880 killer right so let's we'll talk about okay i'll quickly explain why these things happen without

00:10:39.600 going too deep into them i can't what we have within a communist ecosystem is that an individual

00:10:45.760 has no reason to invest in anything that they own because they don't own anything so like if our

00:10:52.720 house requires a ton of effort and work to keep from falling apart this is why if you go to many 0.84

00:11:00.080 communist countries you don't see tons of old houses or you see houses in a horrible disrepair

00:11:05.920 or like giant blocks and horrible disrepair because people didn't have a reason to invest

00:11:12.000 in the upkeep of their own property and the area around their property right like it's not just

00:11:16.720 my house i want to be nice it's a region around my house because that increases its value

00:11:20.560 and this is true of companies this is true of everything it's it's a huge positive cycle that

00:11:24.720 you get out of this the secondary bigger thing is is inefficiency in the way things are operating

00:11:30.560 And what people say, and I think incorrectly, is that you simply can not manage in a planned out format an entire economy.

00:11:39.800 And it is in attempting to do that, that the Soviet systems begin to break down and the communist systems begin to break down in ways that lead to these famines and stuff like that.

00:11:50.440 But when we look at the actual causes of most of the famines, it isn't actually due to problems in inefficient management. 0.69

00:11:59.460 it's it's due to explicitly bad policy like killing all the birds in china that were eating

00:12:07.700 the pests on the crop they were mad that they sometimes ate the crops and then they had giant

00:12:12.540 pests and then a bunch of people died because the way that they were measuring food is they would

00:12:18.060 go to a town and they basically tell the person running the town well if you can't show me x amount

00:12:21.500 of food you're going to be removed from your position right so now they're like oh yeah we've

00:12:25.940 got that amount of food right and then they go to the people and they go hey the military works for

00:12:30.180 me you give all your food for export now they don't have any food left because they were just

00:12:34.420 pretending that they had x amount of food but they wanted to keep their position and they had the

00:12:37.940 guns so they were in a position to do this because if they don't do this then they're put in it now

00:12:41.860 this is all a problem of organization like all of these individual problems could be solved if you

00:12:48.640 had an intelligent and conscientious person going through the system and attempting to address

00:12:54.580 every one of these problems what we really need to get to is why that doesn't happen why these

00:12:59.140 problems never get caused solved why bad ideas get pushed down we need to say can ai prevent this

00:13:03.900 so thoughts before i go further simone i mean i i think you're focusing a lot on the pure

00:13:13.400 governance problems but there's more to it than just that and so it's also important to address

00:13:18.480 those other short shortfalls i'm i'm actually claiming there are not actually the problems

00:13:23.800 that are not governance problems are not that big in communism. So what do you think they are?

00:13:29.560 That we discount the extent to which markets are like an organism or ecosystem that is able to

00:13:37.220 manage huge amounts of information in a very responsive, distributed, natural way. And that

00:13:42.400 when you try to have a human run, mostly blind government system run it, you don't get the data

00:13:51.320 you need like planners don't have enough information about relative scarcity and cost

00:13:56.500 disagree with your thesis here there are ways within a communist system without yeah and the

00:14:03.360 soviet like there's the soviet ogos system that they they tried to create this nationwide

00:14:08.100 information network to to better manage this but they couldn't like just getting the information

00:14:13.800 inputs in a pre-AI age was just not feasible. It isn't just unfeasible. They just did it in bad

00:14:23.940 ways. You can create pseudo capitalistic systems in a communist empire that can measure supply and

00:14:32.800 demand and react to supply and demand with rewards. I mean, you are creating essentially

00:14:39.160 capitalism was extra steps but the idea of having distributive information networks that can

00:14:47.180 recognize scarcity and demand is not something that is out of completely impossible in a communist

00:14:55.460 system the point i'm making here is that if you actually look and i know from like a capitalist

00:14:59.920 perspective the great machine and people have talked about like capitalism is the first ai

00:15:04.720 right and in a way capitalism is kind of the first ai right um but the the capitalist machine

00:15:13.120 or the ai that's created by the giant capitalistic network is not something that it is completely

00:15:20.580 impossible to reverse engineer and the reason i say this is that when we look at the failures

00:15:26.200 of communist systems demonstrably they are not due to failures of centralized control

00:15:34.240 they are due to specific policy failures. I wouldn't say it's just policy failures, too.

00:15:43.980 I think that the fundamental system whereby, again, in a pre-AI age, communism comes to exist,

00:15:52.940 which is this process of like a revolution to socialism to then communism, is doomed to fail,

00:16:00.420 right because you have this revolutionary fervor and then you have the purge where like a bunch of

00:16:08.520 like people lose their property and there's the kulaks and then you get shortages and then you

00:16:13.740 have the famine and then you have the backlash to that the blame we have to we have to handle this

00:16:20.100 oh it's it's capitalism it's all these other things and then that means we have to implement 0.98

00:16:25.280 more controls and then that leads to corrupt and black markets and then that leads to reform

00:16:30.800 or collapse and it's just like things it's it's an inherently unstable system the way you have

00:16:36.340 to stumble into cap or to communism now and here's my fundamental thesis when it comes to communism

00:16:43.320 and ai and how it's going to play out and why it's going to work and why many of the fundamental

00:16:48.200 things that lead to this instability aren't going to be a problem one of the key things being i mean 0.99

00:16:53.900 I know you're talking about like human led governance being really stupid and AGI can 0.97

00:16:57.400 sort of in a hand wavy way, fix that. And the right AGI can, I think the other thing is that 0.99

00:17:03.300 communism is often a problem because a bunch of corrupt power hungry people are like scrambling

00:17:10.840 for the governing power and for the resources of like the workers and all their possessions. Right.

00:17:16.460 But what happens when you have a bunch of people who don't work and don't own anything? No one's going to fight over them. No one wants them. And what I think might happen is that a largely orphaned population, the bottom part of the K-shaped economy, is going to be left high and dry by governments that falter, both due to weird AI disruption, but also due to demographic collapse.

00:17:43.680 and then also just left behind by the rich people who go off to their like

00:17:47.840 that's an interesting thesis but i'm gonna push back on this let me finish with my thing then and

00:17:52.420 then you'll push back and then basically i think that some some of the people who feel bad morally

00:17:58.780 about leaving behind everyone else are going to send down some of their agi gods to just create

00:18:05.240 little communist communities for the people who've been left behind and then those people will be 0.82

00:18:11.460 taken care of by mother AI that will handle all their stuff for them. So you don't have anyone

00:18:18.140 having their property taken away. You don't have anyone, you know, being like accused of corruption

00:18:23.000 or anything. You basically just have AI taking care of those who are left behind. Why is this

00:18:27.840 wrong? So I will get to that in a second. You might get that, but like that is a possible good

00:18:34.820 scenario. But the reason why I think that's wrong is because I fundamentally disagree with you about

00:18:39.860 the first part the first part is is communism and i i keep trying to come back to this because

00:18:46.300 it's actually central to understand why ai will likely fail even within a communist system right

00:18:52.220 like why ai would break communism is that communism doesn't fail because of it prevents

00:19:02.040 competent people for working or it doesn't motivate people enough or it's bad at determining

00:19:07.260 on the ground risks because capitalism just works as this brilliant machine that can measure things

00:19:12.940 about economic states that communism could ever measure and the evidence i used for that is again

00:19:17.980 the failures and the successes we had under communism communism achieved some things that

00:19:23.240 were enormously successful in terms of scientific progress industrial development etc but it also

00:19:30.960 obviously super high does i'm not but what i'm saying is to just be like communism didn't function

00:19:36.040 at all is is factually incorrect and to say that within a communist ecosystem i'm like let's look

00:19:42.780 at a capitalist ecosystem right if you go to a factory what type of person do you want running

00:19:49.460 the factory right the type of person you want running the factory is going to be the most

00:19:53.900 competent person to run the factory who has the support of the the workers and can push them to

00:19:59.720 work their hardest in a communist system what type of person do you want to run the factory

00:20:04.140 it's the same type of person right the people who end up in the lower level management positions

00:20:11.440 in communist and capitalist systems at least aspirationally and how these systems could

00:20:17.500 should be structured are the same types of people like you don't have this and it's also

00:20:23.540 communist systems don't send food to the wrong place you know malevolently or something like

00:20:30.160 that when we talk about communist systems failing at determining what like where economic needs need

00:20:38.520 to go right in the way a capital system would the biggest failures are virtually never because the

00:20:47.800 the system wasn't good at monitoring things they are again when i was talking about like the the

00:20:53.940 wheat famine right it was it was a twofold failure it was a failure of the the way that

00:21:00.180 they were measuring like how much wheat each region had was a very bad way to be measuring

00:21:05.420 each how much weight each region had that led to adverse incentives which led to them sending

00:21:10.820 wheat to locations that didn't need wheat from locations that did need wheat and they created

00:21:15.980 a pest problem because they couldn't tell people above them that they were wrong right now note in

00:21:22.060 a capitalist system you might not be able to tell your boss that they're wrong right like it let's

00:21:27.320 consider ubisoft or something like that i might even in a capitalist system not be able to tell

00:21:32.520 my boss you make a video game about a a black guy in japan going around murdering people it's

00:21:39.500 probably gonna cause problems and a lot of people are going to be very upset by that and then i get

00:21:45.540 fire right but within a capitalist system the wider capitalist ecosystem actually punishes that

00:21:52.580 person not because of an issue of supply and demand in a communist system you'd presumably

00:21:57.340 want to punish the person as well if the goal of the company was entertainment and not spreading

00:22:02.200 the ideology but in the communist system it's often spreading ideology so they probably wouldn't

00:22:05.800 be punished in the same way but you understand i mean like suppose it's something other than a game

00:22:09.560 company and i'm actually like oh the way you're doing this is functionally bad and going to lead

00:22:13.460 to a bad product communist ecosystems should be determining oh this is a bad product and there's

00:22:19.100 functionally ways that they can determine oh this is a product that people don't like but so another

00:22:24.060 question is why do these systems fail in communism right like why do the people in the positions that

00:22:30.440 would be equivalent to like running ubisoft in a communist system not end up getting replaced or

00:22:35.560 not end up getting replaced in the way that they should get replaced and it's because going back

00:22:39.780 to what i was saying originally communist systems fall into two broad categories one is they

00:22:44.940 function like a giant monopoly like the entire government is one giant ultra libertarian monopoly

00:22:50.560 where one company town has taken over everything and houses everyone and blah blah blah blah very

00:22:56.460 dystopian whatever but the thing is is the moment i say that every communist is going to say well

00:23:02.500 that's not the way i want to do communism you know they want to go in arco communism they want to do

00:23:07.180 it's a syndicalism they want to do. Basically they want to have independently operating small

00:23:13.360 communist groups, which extremely doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work is because it leaves

00:23:21.100 a power vacuum. This is also why like extreme forms of libertarianism don't work and everything

00:23:25.840 like that. So suppose I try to set up this anarcho-communist system or even a completely

00:23:33.060 syndicalist system right where like everything is is totally decentralized anybody who decides to

00:23:39.700 act as a bad actor and begin to aggressively and subversively acquiring both support and resources

00:23:46.160 can exert power on anyone who's playing by the rules and this is like a problem like in the

00:23:52.300 molyneux debate when i was trying to figure out how he thought that his weird libertarian utopia

00:23:56.420 would work this is something that like he seemed to fundamentally not understand he's like no

00:24:02.880 everyone will rise up against a bad actor as soon as a bad actor starts accumulating power

00:24:09.120 and i'm like i'm sorry like we have history to look at we know that doesn't happen right like

00:24:16.060 bad actors are actually very good at accumulating power and and then they they build an army and

00:24:21.820 the army can go to the person next to them this is true even outside of even without a military

00:24:26.340 right so this this came when i was talking like extreme forms of libertarianism with steven

00:24:29.840 i was like how do you get something like a chip fat right that costs hundreds of billions of

00:24:35.140 dollars to me yeah years of investment with no payout etc yeah and there might be no payout

00:24:41.200 he's like well i guess we could get like hundreds of millions of workers to form like a cooperative

00:24:46.980 to invest everything into this and then it's like okay then who's operating the cooperative

00:24:54.620 right yeah and they're like well then we would have like some form of democracy and i'm like okay

00:25:00.700 so as soon as somebody gains power was in this giant fabricator state right that's basically

00:25:09.000 it's a state created to run a fabricator why would they not attempt to create systems that

00:25:15.600 prevent them from being removed from power and the answer is of course well everyone would rise

00:25:22.040 up against him if they did something like this the same way that he was like well he's like even if

00:25:26.820 they got away with it even if they accomplished all of this then people wouldn't buy their product

00:25:31.540 because they'd see that they're a bad actor and i'm like bro you have a product in your pocket

00:25:36.240 that was probably made by slaves like you know that's not true you know that you know we're

00:25:41.080 eating food that is or what any mixture of things yeah yeah so what ends up happening because the

00:25:48.700 the wider point i'm making here here is customers don't really punish bad actors you as a watcher

00:25:55.100 of this show likely barely punish bad actors even when you're i mean maybe video games have finally

00:26:01.680 gotten punished because they screwed over gamers for so long but in the vast majority of cases

00:26:06.100 bad actors don't actually end up getting public punished that much by a public sentiment you know

00:26:12.680 even when they do something completely insane it's like their stock will fall like five percent it's

00:26:16.580 like oh no you know i mean bad day to be the ceo because it's like billions of dollars but

00:26:21.240 you know in the grand scheme of like society it doesn't matter so the problem is with the

00:26:28.520 anarchists and all of these power distributed systems is whenever somebody says i'm not going

00:26:33.720 to play by your distributed power rules i'm just going to accumulate all the power for myself

00:26:38.600 they end up growing in influence and functionally that's what happens with most communist governments

00:26:45.560 is they start with a bunch of people saying like let's genuinely try to make this work

00:26:51.180 and then some people begin to gain positions of power and they're like what of instead of

00:26:57.160 genuinely trying to get this to work i use the apparatus of the state to consolidate power

00:27:02.760 around me now it's very hard if you are a faction so let's suppose large communist country two

00:27:09.600 factions come to power with a legitimate government right like i'm not even talking about just like

00:27:13.500 the warlords because you never even get to a stage where you have like pure autonomous regions for

00:27:19.580 very long in these sort of libertarian communist fantasies because they immediately devolve people

00:27:25.720 immediately consolidate power i mean within like a month of it entering any sort of state like that

00:27:30.660 but so i'll function focus on it on the way it actually typically happens you have a bunch of 0.98

00:27:37.100 often sometimes bleeding hearted idiot leftists in a room and haven't really operated anything 0.98

00:27:44.240 before don't really know what they're doing but may have positive intentions for the state 1.00

00:27:48.960 and then you have the guy who comes in the room you're stalin or whatever right who's like

00:27:55.380 uh-huh well let's try to be a bit more efficient about this i'm going to talk with my friends in

00:28:02.360 the military and i tell them hey like these guys aren't really doing things the right way and you

00:28:08.500 know i think you the heads of the military deserve a bit higher standard of living than everyone else

00:28:13.080 don't you think i mean you're controlling you you work so hard compared to everyone else and you

00:28:18.380 begin to instead of trying to distribute wealth and resources equally in the society you begin

00:28:26.080 to distribute wealth and resources in a way that maintains your power within the society your power

00:28:34.120 hierarchy was in the society but still this is all with the supposition that this is humans running

00:28:39.000 and everything and calling the shots right i'm gonna get to the point because with ai it's the

00:28:44.340 same problem right which is i'll get to that in just a second right okay but you need to understand

00:28:51.420 why it fails with humans to understand why it would likely fail with ai so essentially everyone

00:28:58.900 who is a bad actor because they're saying instead of taking all of the resources they can create

00:29:05.220 and distributing them as much as they can they take resources they create they distribute 20

00:29:11.380 and they take 80 to continue consolidating their position so one this leads to a ton of waste in

00:29:17.680 the system in terms of the wealth that the people at the top are living etc but two it leads to

00:29:24.620 all the way down within the power hierarchy bad actors ending up in the highest level power

00:29:31.400 positions because it's basically dictator to dictator to dictator to dictator all the way down

00:29:36.100 the people with with those sorts of mindsets and so you get this enormous corruption because 0.89

00:29:40.480 when i'm thinking about you know do i want to tell my boss that this planning has to kill all 0.99

00:29:45.400 the birds is a dumb idea. I'm not actually thinking about, is this going to help my 0.94

00:29:51.660 sub-state the most, right? Like my region or the people or the farmers, I'm thinking about,

00:29:57.340 is this going to help me consolidate power within my position with the broader hierarchy, right?

00:30:02.160 The problem with AI is AI fundamentally doesn't really change this. So let's assume that you

00:30:10.500 create a truly post-scarcity system, which is essentially what Simone is positioning with her

00:30:19.620 communist ecosystem. So what she's essentially saying, and I don't know if I, I don't disagree

00:30:24.960 with this point, that if you could create true super abundance, the people who are either

00:30:33.820 competent or corrupt enough to end up in the positions of power have so much wealth and

00:30:39.800 abundance that the the coins that fall off their plates feel like ultimate luxury to the people

00:30:47.320 that they're falling in it's not no there's additional motivation they with ai they could

00:30:53.280 have the ability to create broadly from their perspective autonomous ai running communities

00:30:59.280 that feed and house people like a new version of fiefdom you know how like the way that a lot of

00:31:04.940 versions of fiefdom worked was you had the lord who lived on the state and one of the reasons why

00:31:09.300 in these grand houses you had all these ridiculous roles where they were like essentially job

00:31:13.880 programs you know the under butler and the footman and the the the various types of cooks and and all

00:31:20.700 these people it was a jobs program and then everyone in the village i know they they had

00:31:25.060 somewhere to live and then it was this whole little economy they could create presumably a

00:31:31.400 bunch of these little things that are all run by ai that give people little things to do and keep

00:31:36.880 people busy and feed people food and it's not just oh the you know they're eating like food runoff

00:31:43.660 or something it's that it's better to have people be able to show up at these places and and get

00:31:50.720 placed to get a house get a job you know a job have something to do in their life you know become

00:31:56.300 some kind of artist and craftsman or something and live their little picturesque hobbit life

00:32:00.820 than to you know die in large droves and look look bad and a lot of people just don't know right but

00:32:07.100 this is this is the fundamental logical error that you're making here okay it actually comes

00:32:12.660 from growing up in the urban monoculture that you're making this error which is very fun i

00:32:16.380 think you'll see at the moment i pointed out okay when you look at the quality of life of people who

00:32:22.500 are relying on our today version of the types of systems that you're talking about between states

00:32:30.780 the amount of money that goes into these systems is often not just discorrelated but inversely

00:32:38.940 correlated with the actual quality of life of the people living off of the system i think they're

00:32:43.620 gonna know this you're seeing the very first version of ubi that people thanks to the

00:32:49.480 experimentation being done now right they're learning from it they're going to discover

00:32:54.280 no they're not learning okay like in the matrix right they're like oh well we made the first

00:32:57.820 version of the matrix where everyone just had everything and it really didn't work and so we

00:33:01.380 created this new version where everyone has a job and they're miserable and it's perfect

00:33:04.580 and they're going to figure that out with ubi and they're going to already see the best thing to do

00:33:09.660 won't so i'll i'll give you proof that they won't right okay what's right now when i'm talking more

00:33:15.780 broadly if you look at like california's homeless they often live much worse lives and homeless in

00:33:21.600 other areas despite all the money going into that they're trying to fix it they're trying to fix it

00:33:26.380 right? And I'm pointing out to you, why are, because you've got to ask yourself, why are the

00:33:31.380 lives of California's homeless so much worse than other states when so much more money is going to

00:33:36.200 them? And it's because of the inefficient bureaucracy following the same sorts of failings

00:33:41.420 that we see in communist systems. And so now what you're going to come and say is you're going to

00:33:44.440 say like, well, these AI tech lords, they won't fall for these same types of errors. And I'm like,

00:33:51.880 Hmm. Simone in the UBI study that Sam Altman did, do you remember how the team that did the study

00:33:59.940 framed the results to Sam Altman? Did we already see an instance of them in the very first instance

00:34:07.580 where we could be moving down a good pathway immediately lie about and manipulate the results

00:34:13.580 to hide that it didn't work in a way. But Malcolm, those systems are going to collapse.

00:34:19.400 like i'm not saying this is going to happen soon but it's going to happen what do you mean that's 0.97

00:34:24.360 the craziest fucking thing i've ever heard how did what do you mean they're going to collapse 0.92

00:34:28.740 they can't collapse they're ai tech moguls who presumably have near infinity money if you're 0.99

00:34:34.740 talking about in the future right like you think because people are living bad lives in their

00:34:40.340 communist quote-unquote utopias that they're going to care right like they they don't care

00:34:46.300 California, San Francisco doesn't care about its homeless drug addicts who are walking

00:34:52.180 zombed out on the streets and sleep in the poo that's all around the financial district,

00:34:56.820 right?

00:34:57.280 Like if you look at the quality of lives of people who live next to super abundance today,

00:35:03.720 the elites, like your thesis is, oh, they will see their policies failing and they will

00:35:09.520 change their policies when your lived reality is that the exact opposite is happening.

00:35:14.260 Those aren't their policies.

00:35:16.300 they're living within a legacy bureaucracy government system and society that they

00:35:22.920 certainly wouldn't design what i'm describing study was from the ground up techno fiefdoms

00:35:29.780 that will be created by like sort of nature reserves for for for the humans that get left

00:35:35.920 in study was his are you denying it was but what he was what you have to look at the game that he

00:35:43.840 is playing he needs to give people a narrative that makes him comfortable with what's going on

00:35:49.860 today if he were to say to them okay well step one society completely collapses millions of people

00:35:55.000 by step two we're going to create some like nature reserves where people will live and have jobs

00:36:00.800 instead of live these like isolated fantasy lives and and you know going forward for like the people

00:36:05.760 who are left behind like well we'll give a good life to many of them but we can't do that until

00:36:10.640 society collapses because we won't have like the land rights and stuff and we won't be allowed to

00:36:14.980 govern them so for now because i don't want you to like completely firebomb my house successfully

00:36:21.540 this time i'm going to tell you that i have done the research and i'm fully convinced that all i

00:36:28.320 need to do is just give you a lot of money each month and then you can just do whatever you want

00:36:33.160 with it and that will make you happy and people are like okay good well at least sam altman is

00:36:37.840 eventually going to make sure that I get $10,000 a month and it's going to be great. And I'm going

00:36:42.560 to get DoorDash everything and play video games for the rest of my life. And hopefully it'll be

00:36:47.700 fine. But there's no incentive to communicate anything other than UBI to people. Can you

00:36:54.460 imagine if Sam Altman came out and was like, okay, right. So we ran the experiment, we looked at the

00:37:00.180 data and it looks like we actually shouldn't give you money because it doesn't actually make a

00:37:04.960 difference that's like get a job al why don't you get a job if you're so hungry why don't you get a 0.97

00:37:10.900 job get a goddamn job al you got a negative attitude that's what's stopping you you got to 0.98

00:37:17.420 get your act together well you know you can't do that there's two worlds that we live in one is the 1.00

00:37:22.920 world that i'm positive we live in and the other is a world you posit we live in okay so in the

00:37:28.840 world i posit we live in sam altman doesn't actually care about the fate of the vast majority

00:37:34.840 of people he cares about promoting ubi like this is what i assume because it allows him to continue

00:37:43.500 to consolidate power remember how i said bad actors don't really care about the effects of

00:37:48.580 what they're doing they only care about consolidating power so in that world he would do

00:37:53.660 something like conduct a ubi study then lie about the results to mollify people now let's assume

00:38:00.360 world number two simone world simone world is sam altman conducts a study on ubi but he really does

00:38:07.820 want one day because you know what's cheaper than giving everyone money autonomous drone swarms

00:38:13.020 around your house okay but you think okay no one day private islands which you know he'll have

00:38:18.260 right yeah but your plan is no no no no no we live in alternate world where he actually does

00:38:23.260 want some sort of stable utopia for the masses, right? So if we live in this world, what would

00:38:30.280 have happened is he would have conducted that study and the results of the study would have

00:38:35.640 said something like, oh, well, it turns out that a traditional, you know, sort of blanket UBI program

00:38:42.620 doesn't appear to be, doesn't appear to work. So what we need to do is try some alternate type of

00:38:49.780 UBI program. Like, let's try to innovate on this for a type of UBI that does work. That wouldn't

00:38:54.400 have freaked everyone out. That would have had most people looking at the results and being like,

00:38:58.380 oh, this is interesting. You know, you're trying to find something. You found result number one.

00:39:02.320 Instead, you see the exact opposite, the immediate glazing over of any result or data point that

00:39:10.460 doesn't fit his stated agenda or proposed solution to the hellscape that he might be creating.

00:39:17.300 look i just told you that i agree that he doesn't have any incentive to tell the truth about his ubi

00:39:26.400 experiment and that he does if his plan is it's only marginally harder for him to actually try

00:39:34.780 to help people it's just that it's completely irrelevant to him i don't think it is so you can

00:39:40.540 have someone who is incentivized to amass power, amass wealth, may do things even that skirt

00:39:49.060 morality and law to do so, who still feels genuine pain when presented with the plight of human

00:39:57.860 suffering, who would like to make it go away. And once these people have the means to say,

00:40:04.340 okay, AI assistant, please go build something where some of these people can live and make

00:40:11.120 me feel better about this. They will do it. Well, and the point I'm making is they can't

00:40:17.460 do it. Why can't they? If you look at, and this is the reason I was bringing up like social

00:40:23.180 welfare programs in San Francisco and stuff like that. San Francisco is a city that is full of

00:40:29.660 very intelligent tech workers who also yeah but yeah they're stuck with the san francisco

00:40:35.780 residents who have all these nimby laws and they're stuck with all these policies i don't

00:40:40.380 think they believe in supporting things like needle distribution and bad policies that are 0.84

00:40:47.000 implemented in san francisco if you look at them right some of them come from the legacy residents

00:40:53.520 the vast majority come from the donors to the democratic party who are tech moguls that's where

00:41:01.620 the money's coming from that's going into these political packs a problem is is that when you go

00:41:07.600 to said let's say democratic tech mogul and i know this because i know these people from san

00:41:12.620 francisco you know these people from san francisco you go to them and you say this policy of giving

00:41:17.840 people fentanyl on the street it's making their lives harder this policy of putting homeless

00:41:23.320 people in hotel is leading to externalities for residents and they're just like na na na na na na

00:41:28.760 na na na na it'll work next year you're acting like they that and these people care they quote

00:41:36.000 unquote care about the suffering of the poor i just i've yet to encounter anyone who works in

00:41:42.040 the tech world in san francisco who approves of homeless management policy in the area democrat

00:41:49.640 ditto with la well yeah but that's that those are due to very complex like

00:41:54.620 social brainwashing systems in the bay area talking about when you get somebody like

00:42:01.540 sam altman in this sort of a position in power right like suppose he accumulates all this power

00:42:06.840 he's sam altman god king of a region and he's distributing money to the masses in the region

00:42:12.340 let's suppose that the way he's distributing money is leading to the same sorts of externalities

00:42:20.160 that we see among like Portland or San Francisco homeless right now right like massive drug

00:42:25.560 problems the problems we see in Native American communities you know massive crash outs lots of 1.00

00:42:30.860 okay suppose that those are all the functional result of what they're doing okay what Sam Altman 1.00

00:42:38.320 is doing, right? And then you have us online YouTube warriors or something like that, trying

00:42:44.380 to get to Sam Altman to tell him, Hey, none of these policies you're operating are actually

00:42:50.240 working, right? Do you think that we would be able to get in his ear or are the people who are going

00:42:56.220 to be getting in his ear the most, the people who are operating the failed policies, who recommended

00:43:01.680 the failed policies and who have a vested interest in him not fully grokking how much

00:43:08.400 these policies are not working even if you add ai to the chain and he does something like asks ai

00:43:14.860 you know are my policies working or not working you know that like ai is going to gas him on this

00:43:21.840 right ai right now will gas you on democratic policies if you ask ai something like you know

00:43:28.140 is or why democratic policy around like poor people actually effective when you look at like

00:43:35.220 AIs on political charts you know it's going to support these policies that we know functionally

00:43:40.000 don't work so why would it not still do that when he's in god king position and now has three layers

00:43:45.920 of bureaucrats around him that prevent him for fully grokking how much his plan is failing

00:43:51.280 i have doubts about that i just

00:43:55.480 i have severe doubts about that you can look at for example coverage of the mayoral race in los

00:44:04.360 angeles in california and see the level to wait to which people are really really fed up with

00:44:11.520 the homeless policy in california with the housing policy in california i think there's that that

00:44:17.840 demonstrates that people aren't necessarily ideologically locked in to this system that

00:44:22.740 you're describing. Beyond that, it is parasitoidal, this kind of approach to governance, this culture

00:44:31.920 as well. It will kill the host and the host will die. Demographic collapse is such that 0.98

00:44:36.600 these things aren't going to be supported much longer anyway. They're going to collapse on their

00:44:43.240 own. And I don't think AI in the time over the time period over which these systems are going

00:44:48.900 to collapse, AI is not yet going to reach the place, in my opinion, where it will be able to

00:44:56.160 sweep in and deus ex machina style, like fix it. So I really think that these systems are going to

00:45:02.960 fully crumble, which is not the happier scenario. I'm like, I don't want this to happen. It's bad.

00:45:11.500 But these systems won't be left. I do think that many people, when a communist utopia will be created, I think it will be in sovereign city-state style, essentially human reserves that are created for the people who were left behind but who survived.

00:45:31.880 what you need to make ai communist like like post-scarcity worlds work and not lead to the

00:45:41.440 same problems we have with like homelessness and stuff like that in democrat counties and the poor

00:45:45.160 and democrat counties doing much worse is them being operated by an extremely austere and dedicated

00:45:53.900 cast that is ideologically aligned at the level of like religious fervor so if you had like let's

00:46:03.280 say techno puritans end up taking over and and and like really dedicated techno puritans were

00:46:08.020 running everything it could work if you had a state with ai and somebody like the dalai lama

00:46:15.600 like the last dalai lama and the top levels of like the tibetan you know that i'd like look i

00:46:22.000 don't love everything he did i thought he was a bit foolish on a number of issues but that could

00:46:26.840 probably work right because you need to be able to cast off if you personally are not interested

00:46:35.180 either because you were raised this way or you have an extremist ideological commitment in power

00:46:39.800 accumulation or luxury or anything like that outside of for the purpose of some wider objective

00:46:45.820 function you have on reality if you have that then you can use ai to create post scarcity but

00:46:52.680 i think without that being a person's fundamental driver above all other drivers you cannot get

00:47:01.320 true post scarcity even with ai in sort of like how it reaches the masses

00:47:07.600 i guess time will tell yep well we're gonna see and we can hear in the comments what people think

00:47:18.200 basically my thought is the next society we're gonna have to transition into post demographic

00:47:23.220 collapse and everything like that is one of a you know religious fanaticism essentially

00:47:28.760 yeah i mean we can agree on that that's that's more about demographic collapse than it is about

00:47:35.020 artificial intelligence or communism it has more to do with just who's going to continue to

00:47:41.220 have a desire and an interest in reproducing in the face of demographic collapse ai and massive

00:47:49.800 disruption so what's the story was dinner tonight i have one batch of the pork leftover and then

00:47:59.720 after that or we so you can either have that tonight or tomorrow night what i could also do

00:48:03.260 is just tomato soup and grilled cheese or tomato soup and quesadillas tonight if you prefer oh my

00:48:09.500 god quesadillas your quesadillas are so good that's because they have msg in them

00:48:14.700 is the back you have from batch one or batch two batch two

00:48:21.900 yeah i'll wait on that i'll do quesadillas and tomato soup yeah batch two might be more tender

00:48:26.940 since it's leaner meat after just sitting for a couple of days loosening up you know what i mean

00:48:31.740 yeah that makes sense theoretically though i'm very excited the the the what she's talking about

00:48:38.440 a slow cooked pork belly that she's gotten very good at making um and i am very excited for my

00:48:44.300 oh quesadillas tomato soup and fancy fries no a quesadilla is your carb you get to choose one

00:48:54.480 carb do you want tomatoes do you want tomato soup and curly fries no quesadillas okay you can have

00:49:02.280 your curly fries with the leftover pork belly or well pork shoulder in this case tomorrow yeah

00:49:09.480 you're so amazing simone the worst i know also there is not too far from us a an arboretum that

00:49:19.720 we haven't gone to do you want to take the kids there tomorrow since what's an arboretum it's

00:49:24.320 gardens it's it's a it's a garden they have trails like it's just a different place for us to walk

00:49:29.540 yeah uh sure a you know oh wow it is close isn't that crazy never been before free admission

00:49:40.900 that's the whole thing oh no that's not what i thought it was was it arboretum

00:49:46.660 jenkins arboretum and gardens jenkins arboretum and gardens yeah oh it's really cool it's free

00:49:55.640 to enter yeah it's free to enter always they have like a little kid play area i feel like the kids

00:50:01.760 would really enjoy it okay if i'm making good progress on the vtuber thing i want to try to

00:50:06.600 get the thing done before my call was leaflet i've just noticed that every weekend you want to do

00:50:10.840 something special we can do this on a different weekend day but if we go tomorrow it will be the

00:50:17.660 least crowded yeah okay yeah that makes sense let's do it okay i'm looking forward to it i mean

00:50:25.840 i mean you know tomorrow is friday right yeah but we have the kids with us all day okay and you're

00:50:31.500 sure we have the kids with us all day i'll confirm it right now but yeah okay all right love you i

00:50:37.320 guess we're going straight to dinner that's the plan yeah we don't have enough time to record

00:50:42.920 another episode in like 10 minutes love you i'll get professor jane ready for tomorrow yay because

00:50:48.660 i like the title card i created for that plus it's trending stop thinking it's not a big deal

00:50:53.800 but yeah you see we get the full vtuber exports now yeah it's really cool you gave yourself like

00:51:04.640 blonde hair though are we why do you see me with brown hair is that what i'm yes you have brown

00:51:12.640 hair i don't know what to tell you i had blonde hair when i was a kid and our kids have blonde

00:51:17.920 hair so so you just internalize yourself as having blonde hair forever yeah i think it looks more

00:51:26.720 like me when i when i put make them with blonde hair that's so funny like you just kind of

00:51:31.600 of anchored to yourself as a team i wonder that that kind of sticks to my my feeling like everyone

00:51:41.020 has a like a soul age like an age of their personality and yours is like 11 in a good way

00:51:49.160 and mine is like 62 and hopefully a good way and i think honestly i would be more comfortable

00:51:56.080 seeing like a vtuber avatar of like a white haired woman or something than i have anything

00:52:02.060 that i looked like as a kid so i wonder if when people make vtubers of themselves that they just

00:52:08.080 need to whatever their soul age is you know what i mean

00:52:11.920 yeah you want me to kick us off with this one you'd like to do your own kickoffs

00:52:19.040 so okay i'll do a kickoff with this one okay

00:52:26.080 free

00:52:38.540 free

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Based Camp - June 03, 2026

Does AI Make Communism Feasible？ (A Far Right Debate)

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