[pjc50]

> I now work with governments around the world at the Tony Blair Institute, which means I spend a lot of time in rooms where people ask the same question: what can we actually trust these systems to do?

Oh no - we're going to end up with the Starmerbot 3000.

Now I've got the joke out of the way, there's at least four interesting lines of inquiry one could take with this blog post:

- teaching the AI how to play Civilization

- to what extent does this result in "transferable skills", either AI or human? Is this the right game (qv SimCity etc)?

- issues of visibility; "seeing like a state" becomes very literal here. The AI can only make decisions on things it knows about. What are the limits of that when trying to do politics only from statistical information? Should we be referencing Stafford Beer here?

- (at the risk of tripping your AI detector here): modern politics is not so much left vs right as "technocratic wonk" vs "blood and soil". The wonks have comprehensively lost in public opinion. Creating a better wonk is not going to help until there is demand for that kind of politics.

If there ever is a US-China war, it will not be in search of more victory points to meet a win condition, it will be like the Russia-Ukraine war: one guy (on either side!) decides to make hundreds of millions of people worse off out of sheer greed.

[xpct]

I very much dislike the idea of teaching the robot to play Civilization and expect those skills to transfer to their advisory nature.

If anything, I'd almost prefer a leader who hasn't played Civilization in their life. Goes without saying that a mature leader could tell these apart, but in this day and age, I'm not so sure whether everyone could.

[NooneAtAll3]

> one guy (on either side!) decides to make hundreds of millions of people worse off out of sheer greed.

I think you greatly low-ball how complex situation is there

[Planktonne]

> "technocratic wonk" vs "blood and soil"

This is not a binary; it's the same people on the same side.

[pjc50]

No, it very much isn't, although obviously the Kissingers of the world want to pretend that they're in the first category of clear-eyed utility maximising rationalists while they're actually in the second.

That doesn't mean that rational policy planning has never been a thing. The EU while imperfect and frustrating is explicitly orientated towards technocratic consensus rather than the mid-20th-century Europe of nationalist mass murder. Only a tiny number of people think that Von der Leyen and Hitler are equivalent.

(or rather, if you think technocrats and blood-and-soil are the same side, what do you call the "other" side?)

[Planktonne]

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I wouldn't describe the EU as technocratic at all; I'd reserve that label for the people who self-describe as the logical ones--"clear-eyed utility maximising rationalists" as you say--while pushing endlessly for more technology, less regulation and (pretty consistently) hawkish and nationalistic policies. That's very much not the EU.

I don't disagree that there are different approaches in conflict, but the binary of forward-looking technologists vs backward-looking nationalists is very out-of-date.

[pjc50]

Right, yes I think this is just a confusion caused by my use of "technocrat". I've always used it for the technologically assisted bureaucracy, the tendency to view the economy as a cybernetics problem that can be solved by PID control (like inflation targeting). Thiel et al are more "techbro" than "technocrat". Crucially they operate outside of regular politics - they're not running for office, they're not part of the civil service (apart from the brief terrible conflagration of DOGE, an explicit Stalinist purge of old school technocrats)

[ahartmetz]

"Tony Blair Institute" fits right into the "x word horror" Xitter genre. Funded by Larry Ellison to boot!

Tony Blair is the guy who found success by making the UK's left-leaning party (much) more neoliberal and was promptly imitated by Gerhard Schröder in Germany doing basically the same thing. Schröder is also BFF with Putin.