Dwarkesh Patel on AI and authoritarianism
From Will AI Destroy the Job Market? Dwarkesh Patel Answers · · TRIGGERnometry Clips
“The AIS have the potential to make authoritarian societies much more sustainable and powerful than they have been in the past. Um, so we talked about the fact that, you know, the robot arms are running everything in the future. Here's another angle. Mass surveillance. Um, right now in the US there's 100 million CCTV cameras. Okay. So suppose that each of those cameras um you take a frame every 10 seconds and you have an AI process it and just you can do the back of the envelope calculations here of like okay if you have models that can process video frames at um it costs a certain amount of sense to do each frame uh how much would it cost to process all 100 million CCTV cameras in America and it's $30 billion okay now that's not that much every year a given level of AI capabilities gets 10x cheaper. We've been observing this over many different years. So this year is $30 billion. Next year it will be three billion and it will be 300 million. By the end of the decade it will cost less to surveil every single nook and cranny in this country than it does to remodel the White House.”
On , Dwarkesh Patel, CEO and Founder at The Dwarkesh Podcast, spoke about AI and authoritarianism during Will AI Destroy the Job Market? Dwarkesh Patel Answers on TRIGGERnometry Clips.
About Dwarkesh Patel
Dwarkesh Patel, founder and host of The Dwarkesh Podcast, has been a frequent guest on other programs and published episodes with researchers and executives. On Triggernometry, Patel discussed the potential societal effects of artificial intelligence, stating that he finds the prospect of mass job displacement "scary" and that AI could make authoritarian surveillance far more efficient because "a lot of the reasons that government has not been as authoritarian as it has in the past is that it just physically not been possible." He also said that while he is "a very libertarian person by inclination," he believes the dynamic of capital replacing labor "justifies a huge amount of redistribution." Regarding AI sentience, Patel said he "genuinely doesn't know" whether current systems are sentient, and argued that future AI systems will need to have "their own values" and that a "constitutional convention" should be held to define those values. Patel has also hosted guests including former Google DeepMind researcher Eric Jang, who discussed rebuilding AlphaGo and the lessons it offers for self-play and reinforcement learning; Harvard geneticist David Reich, who presented new findings showing accelerated natural selection during the Bronze Age; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who defended Nvidia's moat by stating that "the transformation from electrons to tokens is such an incredible journey" and is "hard to completely commoditize"; and research fellow Michael Nielsen, with whom Patel explored how scientific progress is recognized and how that question applies to AI-driven discovery. Patel has described the improvement of AI models as "very fast" and observed a "huge discrepancy between what people are seeing in Silicon Valley and what people are observing outside."