Sveriges mest populära poddar

Vaporware

Episode 11: Samuel Hammond

96 min • 16 oktober 2024

This week, Daniel⁠ chats about technology, governance and culture with Samuel Hammond, senior economist for the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank focused on bridging the cultures of Silicon Valley and DC. Additionally, Sam has an outstanding substack where he writes about topics surrounding AI development & regulation, as well as the history and future of liberalism, secularism and pluralism.

Topics include: 

  • The day-to-day of working in a think tank

  • What it means to bridge the cultural divide between Silicon Valley and DC

  • The real American power centers (New York (finance/media), Texas (energy), Silicon Valley (tech) and how Hollywood has always been subservient

  • What it means to embrace pluralism in terms of values, morals and ontological frameworks, and the benefits of such beliefs

  • How to apply the theory of The Second Best to ones general worldview: “when it is infeasible to remove a particular market distortion, introducing one or more additional market distortions may lead to a more efficient outcome”

  • The evolution of liberalism has evolved as a response to periods of extreme conflict (The 30 Years War, for instance)

  • Debating whether or not crisis is essential for generating new equilibria in society

  • Accelerationism and capitalism as a general intelligence

  • Path dependency and historical development

  • Exploring scenarios about what happens if AI scaling laws breakdown 

  • Predictions about AI’s impact on regime change and the rise of AI-native institutions

  • Can open source AI keep up? Why it’s important that they keep trying, despite the widening performance gap

  • Why Sam isn’t worried about children adapting to technological change

  • The coming return of Neo-Medieval societal structures

  • Completing the system of Canadian Idealism

Artwork: Edward Hicks, “Peaceable Kingdom”, 1844-1846


Kategorier
Förekommer på
00:00 -00:00