“Video and transcript of talk on ‘Can goodness compete?’” by Joe Carlsmith
(This is the video and transcript of a public talk I gave at Mox in San Francisco in July 2025, on long-term equilibria post-AGI. It's a longer version of the talk I gave at this workshop. The slides are also available here.)
Introduction
Thank you. Okay. Hi. Thanks for coming.
Aims for this talk
So: can goodness compete? It's a classic question, and it crops up constantly in a certain strand of futurism, so I'm going to try to analyze it and understand it more precisely. And in particular I want to distinguish between a few different variants, some of which are more fundamental problems than others. And then I want to try to hone in on what I see as the hardest version of the problem – and in particular, possible ways good values can have inherent disadvantages and competition with other value systems. For [...]
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Outline:
(00:30) Introduction
(00:50) Aims for this talk
(01:54) Basic vibe
(03:28) Lineage of concern
(04:31) What I mean by goodness
(07:23) What I mean by competition
(09:27) Can \*humans\* compete?
(11:21) Some distinctions
(14:17) Alignment taxes
(16:52) More fundamental variants
(18:24) Negative sum dynamics
(20:36) The strategy stealing assumption
(21:59) Locust-like value systems
(25:47) Other ways the strategy stealing assumption might fail
(28:43) Addressing failures of the strategy stealing assumption
(32:05) Is preventing/constraining competition in this way even possible?
(34:11) Is preventing/constraining competition in this way desirable?
(36:36) What is a locust world actually like?
(38:03) Might a locust world be less bleak than this?
(44:15) Current overall take
(45:33) Poem: Witchgrass
(47:51) Q&A
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First published:
July 17th, 2025
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Senaste avsnitt
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.