Broadsheet

I’ve been dealing with more rabbit problems today, so here’s a repost to tide you over til tomorrow.

The Republican party has become an extremist party. ICE’s brutal campaign of terror in American communities, Trump’s attacks on press freedoms and election integrity, the coup attempt of 1/6/2021, Trump’s military threats toward Greenland, and friendliness toward Vladimir Putin are only a few of the more prominent examples of this extremism. And they’re probably going to be punished for it in November; polls show rapidly deteriorating support for both Donald Trump and the GOP that has fallen in behind him.

Good. Extremism ought to be punished. I’ll have lots more to say about the Republicans’ failures in the days to come.

But even though Democrats deserve to win, that doesn’t mean they’re free from the creeping extremism that has taken over essentially all of American politics and public discourse in the age of social media. Although Dems are not nearly as extremist as the GOP, they have become a much more ideologically extreme party than they were during the days of Obama. Dems’ extremist positions include dogged opposition to any form of effective immigration enforcement, tolerance of systematic (and systemic) racial discrimination, various trans issues, and…land acknowledgements.

Land acknowledgements? Really?? Isn’t that just a respectful way of acknowledging that the land we’re on used to belong to Indigenous people? Isn’t it just a way of saying “Hey Indigenous people, we haven’t forgotten you”?

Well…no. As I wrote in a post two years ago — still one of my most popular posts of all time — land acknowledgements don’t just recognize Indigenous people. They are a way of fundamentally delegitimizing the United States — of declaring that this is a country that has no right to exist. And beyond that, land acknowledgements implicitly advance a theory of collective racial ownership of territory that is morally indistinguishable from the worst blood-and-soil nationalism of the racist far Right.

Nor are land acknowledgements a fringe practice, limited to progressive cultural spaces. As Dave Weigel recently reported, they have become a sort of ritualistic utterance at Democratic Party events:

Democrats' decision to formalize land acknowledgments in their party meetings could haunt their candidates more than they realize…A tradition of naming historic Native tribes during regional events that started in Australia before spreading to Canada, arriving in the US via art exhibitions, is now part of every major party event…The 2016 Democratic convention did not contain a land acknowledgment. But the practice of beginning events with a nod to slaughtered tribes and "stolen" land spread during President Barack Obama's second term and Trump's first term, along with other progressive ideas about race and history…Democrats did not have campus conferences where they agreed to embrace language that conservatives see as anti-American…They just adopted the terminology when activists told them it was a good idea.

Land acknowledgements are not a big electoral issue. But in the long term, they represent — and contribute to — the creeping rise of anti-American and illiberal ideology on the broad American left. That will probably be an electoral liability at some point, but more fundamentally, it’s a departure from the liberal nationalist ideology that made the Democrats such an effective governing party in the 20th century.

So anyway, here’s my post from 2024.

The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest. Most of its current territory was occupied or frequented by human beings before the U.S. came; the U.S. used force to either displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people. To the extent that land “ownership” existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land.

This was also true before the U.S. arrived. The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land. The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again. If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.

If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?

I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups. In general, the first people who arrived on a piece of land did so in dribs and drabs, in small family units and tiny micro-tribes that met and married and fought and mixed and formed into larger identities and ethnicities and tribes over long periods of time. In most cases, the ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land.

But even in those cases when it did exist, why should land ownership be assigned to a race at all? Why should my notional blood relation to the discoverers or the conquerors of a piece of land determine whether I can truly belong on that land? Why should a section of the map be the land of the Franks, or the Russkiy, or the Cherokee, or the Han, or the Ramaytush Ohlone, or the Britons? Of course you can assign land ownership this way — it’s called an “ethnostate”. But if you do this, it means that the descendants of immigrants can never truly be full and equal citizens of the land they were born in. If Britain is defined as the land of the Britons, then a Han person whose great-great-great-grandparents moved there from China will exist as a contingent citizen — a perpetual foreigner whose continued life in the land of their birth exists only upon the sufferance of a different race. This is the price of ethnonationalism.

The downsides of ethnonationalism have been exhaustively laid out in the decades since World War 2, and I’m not going to reiterate them all now. Suffice it to say that most nations of the world have moved away from ethnonationalism — there is an informal sense in which some people still think of France as the land of the Franks and so on, but almost all nations define citizenship and belonging through institutions rather than race. Israel, one of the few exceptions to this rule, receives a large amount of international criticism for defining itself as an ethnostate.

And yet these days I am subjected to a constant stream of ethnonationalist claims from progressives in the country of my birth. Here’s one from the ACLU of Nebraska:

And here’s an Instagram post from Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib:

This isn’t just something you see on social media around Thanksgiving. “Land acknowledgements” have become ubiquitous in progressive spaces and institutions — just the other day I saw one at my friend’s community dance recital.

These land acknowledgements are, legally speaking, incorrect — there is no legal sense in which the land on which they are being performed belongs to a Native American tribe. These are moral claims about rightful land ownership. But the moral principle to which they appeal is ethnonationalism — it’s the idea that plots of land are the rightful property of ethnic groups.

There is an obvious moral appeal to these land acknowledgments. They are a way of decrying the brutal, cruel, violent history of conquest and colonization. And they probably feel like a way of standing up for the weak, the marginalized, and the dispossessed.

Yet what should we think of the morality of following the principles behind land acknowledgements to their logical conclusion? “Decolonization” of the land of the U.S. would likely be an act of ethnic cleansing surpassing even the previous conquests — there are 330 million people here now, and almost none of them descend from Native Americans. An attempt to dispossess 330 million people would inevitably involve violence on a colossal scale. Here was Najma Sharif Alawi’s famous tweet right after the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel:

Of course, “colonizers” could presumably avoid violent death or second-class citizenhood by voluntarily deporting themselves. But where would they go? Take me, for example. My ancestors were Lithuanian Jews. I could leave the country of my birth and go “back” to Lithuania — a land I don’t know, whose language I don’t speak. Yet my ancestors were not “indigenous” to Lithuania either; they moved there from somewhere else. What if the ethnic Lithuanians chose not to accept me? Where would I go then? Israel? But the folks who do land acknowledgements would consider me a “colonizer” there as well.1

Would I then wander the Earth, desperately seeking some ethnostate that would allow me and my descendants to live there as a permanently precarious resident aliens?

Once the logic of land acknowledgements and “decolonization” is followed, it leads very quickly to some very dark futures. Assigning each person a homeland based on their ethnic ancestry, and then declaring that that homeland is the only place they or their descendants can ever truly belong, would not be an act of justice; it would be a global nightmare made real, surpassing even the horrors of previous centuries.

And in practice, any attempt to create such a world would inevitably lead to violent resistance by the groups in danger of being “decolonized”. The orderly world of nation-states would dissolve into a chaotic free-for-all of competing irredentist claims, backed by genocides and expulsions. Ten thousand October 7th-style attacks would be followed by ten thousand Gaza-style wars.

I do not want that, and you should not want it either. The American people certainly don’t want it, and the insistence of progressives on intoning land acknowledgements has probably tanked the movement’s cachet in wider society. I agree with “Wanye Burkett” when he says that land acknowledgements have probably hurt the Democratic party:

Americans do not want to see their country destroyed in the name of irredentist ethnonationalism. Nor do I blame them.

So does this mean we should paper over, ignore, or deliberately forget America’s history of violent conquest? Absolutely not. That history ought to be remembered, so that we don’t repeat it in the present day. The world’s evolution from one based on ethnic cleansing and territorial conquest to one based on fixed borders and institutions is something to celebrate — and something we must fight to preserve. We need to remember what the world used to be like, precisely so we can avoid backsliding. The most recent of conquests, expulsions, and genocides should be the last to ever happen.

And what of the Native Americans who still live in America today? Must they simply be regarded as the unlucky losers of history, and told to either assimilate into broader American society or shut up?

Absolutely not. For one thing, tribal organizations still exist — they may notionally represent ethnic groups, but they are institutions. And they are institutions with which the United States has many agreements and legal obligations that must be honored, which often give the tribes sovereignty over areas of land. Neil Gorsuch has been especially active in pushing the Supreme Court to uphold tribal rights, and I think this is a good thing.

But respect for Native American tribal organizations doesn’t have to stop at ancient obligations. There are ways to incorporate those tribes into the modern American nation that both respects them and their history and helps them prosper in the present.

Vancouver, Canada shows us an example of how this can be done. Part of Vancouver’s downtown urban area is officially under the governance of the Squamish Nation, rather than the city itself. The Squamish Nation, realizing they could do whatever they wanted with that land, decided to build a giant high-rise housing development:

Over the next few years, that skyline will get a very large new addition: Sen̓áḵw, an 11-tower development that will [put] 6,000 apartments onto just over 10 acres of land in the heart of the city. Once complete, this will be the densest neighbourhood in Canada, providing thousands of homes for Vancouverites who have long been squeezed between the country’s priciest real estate and some of its lowest vacancy rates.
Sen̓áḵw is big, ambitious and undeniably urban—and undeniably Indigenous. It’s being built on reserve land owned by the Squamish First Nation, and it’s spearheaded by the Squamish Nation itself, in partnership with the private real estate developer Westbank. Because the project is on First Nations land, not city land, it’s under Squamish authority, free of Vancouver’s zoning rules. And the Nation has chosen to build bigger, denser and taller than any development on city property would be allowed.

Here’s a picture of what it will look like:

An even bigger development called Jericho Lands is now being planned, by a consortium of tribal organizations, on land officially owned by Vancouver.

Hilariously, Vancouver’s NIMBYs are complaining, claiming that the developments are not in keeping with Indigenous tradition. But Canada’s First Nations seem to have little interest in hewing closely to other people’s view of what their traditions are. Modern people do not want to live like premodern farmers. They are not mystical Tolkien elves. They would like to have shiny new apartment buildings and walkable neighborhoods.

This, I believe, is the key to respecting and honoring Native Americans — not to focus on the tragedies of their past, but to give them the right to build a better future. Tribal lands should definitely have the autonomy to do whatever they want with their lands, including building housing or industry. In fact, we’re starting to see a pattern emerge where Native Americans embrace laissez-faire policies toward industry and manage to poach business from their over-regulated neighbors:

Tesla is ramping up efforts to open showrooms on tribal lands where it can sell directly to consumers, circumventing laws in states that bar vehicle manufacturers from also being retailers in favor of the dealership model…
Mohegan Sun, a casino and entertainment complex in Connecticut owned by the federally recognized Mohegan Tribe, announced this week that the California-based electric automaker will open a showroom with a sales and delivery center this fall on its sovereign property where the state’s law doesn’t apply…The news comes after another new Tesla showroom was announced in June, set to open in 2025 on lands of the Oneida Indian Nation in upstate New York.

This sort of thing could lead to a win-win for the U.S. and Native American tribes. American reindustrialization is being held back by a thicket of procedural requirements and local land-use regulations; if tribes were able to use their special legal status to circumvent those barriers, it could end up benefitting everyone.2 The tribes would get both jobs and the ability to tax local industry; America would get to execute an end run around the NIMBYs that are holding it back.

In fact, it’s probably possible for various American cities to turn over parts of their land to tribal jurisdiction, with the assistance of the federal government. This would probably result in dense urban developments like the ones being planned in Vancouver. But even if it didn’t, it could have other commercial benefits — again, a win-win for the U.S. and for the tribes. That would certainly be a lot more substantive than a bunch of land acknowledgements. And it would likely satisfy many people’s desire for “giving land back” to Native Americans, without embracing dubious moral principles of ethnic land rights and irredentism.

In other words, you’re not living on Indigenous land right now, but you could be in the future — and it might be pretty great.

The general principle here is that instead of a dark world of ethnic cleansing in the name of “decolonization”, we should try to build a bright future where Native Americans and the United States of America exist in harmony and cooperation rather than in conflict. And that principle doesn’t just apply to America, but to the whole world. The history of land ownership is a violent and terrible one, but that doesn’t mean the future has to be more of the same.

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It is a bitter irony that many of the same people who morally condemn Israel for setting itself up as an ethnostate also justify its destruction using ethnonationalist principles. Personally, I tend to agree with the criticism of Israel’s ethnocentrism, but I don’t think replacing this with Palestinian ethnocentrism would make things better.

There’s a lot of historical precedent for this. For example, in the 1960s, Fairchild Semiconductor opened a factory on Navajo land in New Mexico, which was quite beneficial to the economy until an industry downturn and a labor dispute led to its demise in the late 70s.

Rank	State	Project	Estimated Cost	Length	Cost per Mile (Centerline)
1	Oregon/Washington	Interstate Bridge Replacement (WA/OR I-5)	$15.0 Billion	~5.0 mi	$3,000.0M / mi
2	New York	Brooklyn Queens Expressway Central Project (Brooklyn)	$4.0 Billion	~1.5 mi	$2,667 M / mi
3	Oregon	I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project	$3.5 Billion	~1.5 mi	$2,333 M / mi
4	Massachusetts	Allston I-90 Multimodal Project (Boston)	$2.0 Billion	~1.5 mi	$1,333.3M / mi
5	New Jersey	New Jersey Turnpike Hudson County Extension	$10.7 Billion	~8.1 mi	$1,321.0M / mi
6	Connecticut	I-84 Hartford Mobility / Replacement Plan	$5.0 Billion	~4.0 mi	$1,250.0M / mi
7	Louisiana	I-10 Calcasieu River Bridge Replacement (Lake Charles)	$3.1 Billion	~5.5 mi	$563.6M / mi
8	Texas	North Houston Highway Improvement Project (I-45)	$13.0 Billion	~24.0 mi	$542.0M / mi
9	California	Highway 37 (Santa Rosa/Vallejo)	$11.0 Billion	~21.0 mi	$523.0M / mi
10	Rhode Island	Washington Bridge I-195 Emergency Replacement	$400 Million	~0.8 mi	$500.0M / mi
11	Wisconsin	I-94 East-West Corridor (Milwaukee)	$1.7 Billion	~3.5 mi	$485.7M / mi
12	Ohio/Kentucky	Brent Spence Bridge Corridor (OH/KY Shared)	$3.6 Billion	~8.0 mi	$450.0M / mi
13	Virginia	Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel (HRBT) Expansion	$3.9 Billion	~9.9 mi	$393.9M / mi
14	Maryland	I-495 & I-270 Capital Beltway Managed Lanes	$1.5 Billion	~4.0 mi	$375.0M / mi
15	Alabama	I-10 Mobile River Bridge & Bayway	$3.5 Billion	~10.0 mi	$350.0M / mi
16	Georgia	I-285 / GA-400 Interchange & Top End Express Lanes	$4.6 Billion	~16.0 mi	$287.5M / mi
17	South Carolina	I-526 Lowcountry Corridor (Charleston)	$4.0 Billion	~14.0 mi	$285.7M / mi
18	Nevada	Project Neon / I-15 Trop-LVC Improvement (Las Vegas)	$1.0 Billion	~3.7 mi	$270.3M / mi
19	Utah	I-15 Expansion & Bottleneck Fix (Salt Lake County)	$3.7 Billion	~17.0 mi	$217.6M / mi
20	Illinois	Tri-State Tollway (I-294) Expansion	$4.0 Billion	~22.0 mi	$181.8M / mi
21	Oklahoma	I-44 / I-235 Interchange Expansion (Oklahoma City)	$680 Million	~4.5 mi	$151.1M / mi
22	Pennsylvania	Mon-Fayette Expressway (PA Route 43 Extension)	$2.1 Billion	~14.0 mi	$150.0M / mi
23	Arkansas	I-30 Crossing Project (Little Rock)	$1.00 Billion	~7.3 mi	$137.0M / mi
24	Hawaii	Honolulu Rail/H-1 Corridor Integration	$650 Million	~5.0 mi	$130.0M / mi
25	Colorado	Central 70 Project (Denver)	$1.2 Billion	~10.0 mi	$120.0M / mi
26	Tennessee	Choice Lanes Program (I-24 / I-65 Nashville Corridor)	$3.0 Billion	~26.0 mi	$115.4M / mi
27	Florida	I-4 Ultimate / Beyond the Ultimate Corridor	$2.3 Billion	~21.0 mi	$109.5M / mi
28	Iowa	I-80 / I-380 System Interchange (Iowa City)	$387 Million	~4.0 mi	$96.8M / mi
29	North Carolina	Complete 540 / NC 540 Triangle Expressway	$2.2 Billion	~28.0 mi	$78.6M / mi
30	Michigan	I-75 Modernization (Oakland County)	$1.0 Billion	~18.0 mi	$55.6M / mi
31	Delaware	U.S. 301 Toll Road Extension	$636 Million	~12.5 mi	$50.9M / mi
32	New Mexico	I-25 / I-40 “Big I” & South Corridor Upgrades	$250 Million	~5.0 mi	$50.0M / mi
33	North Dakota	I-94 / I-29 Tri-Level Interchange Rebuild (Fargo)	$95 Million	~2.0 mi	$47.5M / mi
34	Idaho	I-86 / I-15 System Interchange Rebuild (Pocatello)	$112 Million	~2.5 mi	$44.8M / mi
35	Maine	I-95 / Hampden Bridge & Corridor Rebuild	$85 Million	~2.0 mi	$42.5M / mi
36	Minnesota	I-494 Airport to Hwy 169 Corridor	$377 Million	~9.0 mi	$41.9M / mi
37	New Hampshire	I-93 Widening (Salem to Manchester)	$800 Million	~19.8 mi	$40.4M / mi
38	Mississippi	I-20 / I-55 West Jackson Corridor Improvements	$180 Million	~4.5 mi	$40.0M / mi
39	West Virginia	Corridor H (Elkins to West Virginia/Virginia State Line)	$1.20 Billion	~30.0 mi	$40.0M / mi
40	Arizona	I-10 Wild Horse Pass Corridor Expansion	$1.0 Billion	~26.0 mi	$38.5M / mi
41	South Dakota	I-29 / 85th Street Interchange (Sioux Falls)	$65 Million	~2.0 mi	$32.5M / mi
42	Nebraska	US-77 South Lincoln Beltway	$352 Million	~11.0 mi	$32.0M / mi
43	Kansas	U.S. 69 Express Lanes (Overland Park Expansion)	$570 Million	~18.0 mi	$31.7M / mi
44	Vermont	U.S. Route 2 / I-89 Reconfiguration (Chittenden)	$45 Million	~1.5 mi	$30.0M / mi
45	Alaska	Seward Highway Upgrades (MP 75–90 / MP 100–105)	$380 Million	~20.0 mi	$19.0M / mi
46	Montana	I-90 Missoula Corridor Reconstruction	$140 Million	~8.0 mi	$17.5M / mi
47	Indiana	I-69 Finish Line (Evansville to Indianapolis)	$2.0 Billion	~142.0 mi	$14.1M / mi
48	Missouri	Improve I-70 Statewide Program (3-Lane Expansion)	$2.8 Billion	~200.0 mi	$14.0M / mi
49	Wyoming	I-80 Elk Mountain / Winter Safety Corridor Upgrades	$85 Million	~15.0 mi	$5.7M / mi

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* * *

Imagine you are 20 years old and offered the following bet:

There will be one spin of a roulette wheel, which contains all the integers from zero to X, where X is not disclosed. If the ball lands on zero you die. Any other outcome wins you $1,000,000 and a pill that prevents cancer and heart disease. Do you take the bet? If I live in Switzerland, probably not. If I live in rural Pakistan or Nigeria, I probably would.

Now suppose the value of X remains unknown, but various roulette experts have opinions. A few think that X is zero—that you are certain to lose. The median expert thinks it’s about 19 (giving you a 95% chance of winning), while some experts believe the value of X is extremely high—implying that you are very likely to win the bet. But you don’t know whether the opinions of these experts are valid. Indeed, you are not even entirely sure that the risk of dying is higher if you play the game than if you choose to sit out the game.

Long-time readers know that I am almost entirely agnostic on the question of AI-risk. To me, LLMs seem like magic. “LLMs predict the next token, one at a time.” I have no idea what that means. Heck, I don’t even understand human intelligence, how could I possibly understand an alien intelligence like LLMs?

On the other hand, I consider myself to be a reasonably rational person, with a Bayesian approach to beliefs about the world. While I have no direct opinion on the question of AI risk, I do have opinions on the sorts of arguments being employed by people with much greater understanding of AI than I have. As an outsider, I find some of the debate to be a bit frustrating. In this post, I won’t offer an opinion about AI, rather I’ll offer some opinions about opinions about AI.

1. Why two camps?

I see a lot of debate between “doomers” and “accelerationists”, even though the majority of experts don’t seem to fall neatly into either camp. So why so much debate over those two positions, while the most popular expert opinion is largely ignored? Or perhaps it is not being ignored, rather it is being mischaracterized? Either way it’s annoying.

Polls show that only a small minority of AI experts think that doom is more likely than not, and only a small percentage believe that AI is almost perfectly safe. The median view seems to be something on the order of a 5% risk of extinction, with the average risk being somewhat higher than the median:

AI researchers, AIImpacts 2022 : give “really bad outcomes (such as human extinction)” a 14% probability, with a median of 5%. 82% believe the alignment problem is important.

You might object that even a 5% risk of extinction is really bad, and many people would group these people in with the doomer position (which I’ll call more than 50% risk of extinction).

That’s fine, but much of the debate takes the doomer position to be that human extinction is very likely, which means that lumping these two positions together can be quite misleading. For instance, if markets expected doom, then interest rates would probably rise sharply. If markets came to expect a 5% risk of doom, then rates would only rise slightly. Any discussion of market expectations needs to discriminate between these two positions. Either a 5% extinction risk is not doom, or if it is doom then current market prices are perfectly consistent with the doomer position.

I do believe that market prices, used appropriately, are the best way of evaluating the likelihood of various future outcomes. Some people will object that the markets failed to predict Covid, even after the pandemic was spreading in China. I agree that, ex post, that event looks pretty bad for market efficiency. And I don’t doubt that some scientists made money by selling the market short in February 2020. But I also believe that people overrate market inefficiency during that period, for two reasons:

First, covid was one of a number of pandemic scares, most of which didn’t end up amounting to much (so far.) I’ve read scary stories about SARS1, Ebola, monkeypox, dengue fever, bird flu and lots of other potential dangers. The market had plausible reasons to believe that fears were overblown.

Second, it was a closer call than most people realize as to whether SARS2 (Covid) was something that could be controlled. China did control it fairly quickly, and China has 1.4 billion people—as many as the entire world in 1880. That fact is too often overlooked. Covid eventually did return to China, but only because the rest of the world failed to control it. And it wasn’t just China; New Zealand and Australia were also able to control the virus, only getting new cases from the outside. If those were the only three countries in the world. Covid would have been extinct by the summer of 2020.

Alternatively, if Covid had been just slightly less infectious, the entire pandemic could have been nipped in the bud. That’s probably what the markets (wrongly) assumed would happen. Unfortunately, it was just barely infectious enough to be unstoppable outside of China. Markets wrongly assumed the US and Europe were just as competent (or authoritarian, take your pick) as China and Australia. We weren’t.

[BTW, I’m NOT suggesting we should have taken the China/Australia approach.]

Our strange inability to visualize extinction

I recall a poll of AI experts that suggested they were more concerned about the possible impact of AI on election integrity than they were about extinction risk, even though the median expert was quite worried about extinction risk. In some respects, that seems completely nuts.

On the other hand, I do sort of understand this odd poll result. It’s very hard to think about extinction risk, as the idea is so far removed from our daily life. For instance, there’s been a lot of discussion of the fact that a rising risk of extinction should cause higher interest rates. And an increasing number of people are worried about extinction risk. And interest rates have been rising. So . . .

So . . .

Yeah, I know what you are thinking.

I read a lot of financial news, and I recall exactly zero articles in the WSJ, FT, NYT, Economist, etc., that mentioned rising extinction risk in an article on the bond market. I’d go even further. If a reporter mentioned rising extinction risk as a factor explaining rising bond yields, I think they’d be viewed as a sort of lunatic. I might view them as a lunatic. And again, that is despite the fact that polls show that most people are increasingly worried about extinction risk from AI, and rising extinction risk would be expected to cause higher interest rates, and interest rates are rising. So, what gives?

I believe people tend to compartmentalize their thinking. One part of the brain has thinking about grand philosophical narratives, like alien visitation, the existence of God, life after death, the power of prayer, and the end of the world. Another part has thinking about pragmatic issues like what groceries do I need to buy this week. And the two compartments are separate. If your child has cancer, one part of you prays to God and another part seeks out expert medical advice. (Indeed, I feel a bit weird even writing about existential risk in this dispassionate tone. I think I can only do so because one part of my brain doesn’t really believe in it.)

I am not saying that doomerism is some sort of weird religious cult (others do make that claim.) I take doomerism quite seriously. Rather I’m saying that our brains put it into that separate philosophical compartment. That’s why financial reporters don’t mention it in their columns, even though it is something that logically should be offered as an explanation for rising rates (albeit not the only explanation—deficits, credit demand for data centers and inflation worries are also reasonable explanations.)

As an aside, I think market data is far more relevant to the impact of AI on economic growth than to the doomer question. Markets clearly don’t put a high probability on doom, but as noted above the median AI expert sees a 5% risk of extinction, which is still very bad. And a 5% extinction risk would be hard to spot in financial markets. Instead, I believe the most useful financial market data is the fact that the level of interest rates remains near historical norms, casting doubt on the hypothesis that economic growth will accelerate sharply in the near future.

I suppose you could argue that slow expected growth is good news. An expected large acceleration of economic growth is more likely to be associated with AI advances rapid enough to pose existential risks. So perhaps there is some market information after all.

Our flawed moral intuitions about extinction

When I first started thinking about this issue, I assumed that a 5% risk of human extinction had an expected cost of 400 million lives (5% of the world’s population.) Later, I wondered if that undersold the risk, as extinction would also deprive all future generations from being able to experience life. But that opens up another can of worms. If someone had killed Genghis Khan, would they have also murdered his 40 million descendants? What about abortion? Birth control? What about Parfit’s “Repugnant Conclusion”?

I don’t have any good answers to the question of how to think about potential lives, other than to note that, at an intuitive level, extinction seems a worse problem than everyone currently alive dying. Everyone alive today presumably will soon be dead, within roughly 125 years. (If not, it will be due to AI.) The consolation that life will go on for future generations seems intuitively important.

I suspect that AI bets favor the poor.

Right now, AI is enriching many of the world’s richest people. Nonetheless, I suspect that in the long run the cost/benefit calculation for AI tends to favor the poor. If that seems counterintuitive, consider a technology like cell phones. I was perfectly happy with my 20th century landline, but cell phones brought telecommunications services to billions of peasants in the developing world for the first time. I would not take the bet discussed in the top of this post, risking my life for a 95% chance at a million bucks. But if I were a poor peasant in Africa or South Asia, I absolutely would take that bet. If AI does usher in an era of superabundance, the effects will eventually trickle down to the developing world. In America we’d all become billionaires, and Africans would become millionaires.

Sound crazy? You could argue that the average middle-class American is already richer than medieval kings and queens, at least in most important respects.

To be clear, I’m agnostic on whether AI will be powerful enough to either end the world or end scarcity as an economic problem, but the two possibilities clearly seem to be correlated. If AI ends up being merely a modest boost to technology, then neither the greatest hopes nor the worst fears will be realized. If AI ends up being extremely powerful, then I’d expect the poor to be more willing to take the bet. But the decisions on AI regulation will be made in rich countries, which are already showing signs of increasing risk aversion (although I suspect we’ll proceed anyway.)

Gross versus net risk.

This one has received some discussion. I seem to recall Tyler Cowen arguing that AI might reduce certain types of catastrophic risks, such as nuclear war and/or pandemics. Elizer Yudkowsky has a similar view:

And one should not fail to mention—for it also impacts upon existential risk—that Artificial Intelligence could be the powerful solution to other existential risks, and by mistake we will ignore our best hope of survival. The point about underestimating the potential impact of Artificial Intelligence is symmetrical around potential good impacts and potential bad impacts. . . .
It looks to me like a successful resolution of Artificial Intelligence should help us considerably in dealing with nanotechnology. I cannot see how nanotechnology would make it easier to develop Friendly AI. If huge nanocomputers make it easier to develop AI without making it easier to solve the particular challenge of Friendliness, that is a negative interaction.

The difference is that Yudkowsky nonetheless sees a much greater downside AI risk than does Cowen, as he believes we needed to solve the alignment problem before developing AI (which we don’t seem to be doing.)

AI could also magnify pre-existing risks. Noah Smith recently suggested that AI might allow a bad actor to create a global pandemic, something I’ve also worried about. But note that this risk exists even in a world without AI.

During the 1980s, I recall thinking about how lucky humanity was that HIV could not be transmitted as easily as the common cold virus. Given its long incubation period, a highly contagious HIV could have infected most of the world’s population before it was identified. Even without AI, a bioterrorist might be able to engineer a catastrophic pandemic.

Now assume that AI allows us to build better defenses against pandemics. In this case, having AI might also allow us to better prepare for future pandemics, perhaps by identifying lots of potential classes of dangerous viruses, and stockpiling vaccines for potential outbreaks. As an analogy, some are suggesting that although AI increases the risk of computer hacking, it may nonetheless by a net plus by increasing our cybersecurity capabilities to an even greater extent.

In general, AI optimists tend to argue that more information is a good thing, and that AI is likely to do more good than harm. Artificial super-intelligence (ASI) might bring us a cancer cure much faster than otherwise. But here is one area where we cannot dodge the difficult problem of valuing future generations. If there is a 10% risk of a non-AI generated pandemic that kills 60% of the world’s population, the expected damage is larger than a 5% risk of total extinction from AI, but only if you ignore future generations.

If you also value future generations, then extinction risk suddenly looms vastly larger, so much so that ASI proponents would probably have to find an argument that not doing AI presents equal extinction risks, and it is not clear if that’s possible. Even nuclear war or an extremely bad pandemic would not kill everyone. In that case, the argument for ASI requires net extinction risks to be lower than the median expert fears—well below 5%.

Bayesian reasoning

Bayesians are supposed to start with prior beliefs about the world and then adjust their beliefs as new information comes in. I don’t have even a clue as to how to think about AI extinction risk, so if forced to establish a prior I’d probably just pick something like the median view of the AI experts, even though I suspect their estimates are more like “guesstimates”. Or maybe somewhat less, because of the gross/net risk distinction discussed above.

I do believe that most tech people overestimate the risk of mass job loss from AI, but that’s because economics is one area where I feel I do have some expertise. You might think I should then downgrade their AI extinction risk for the same reason that I downgraded their job loss estimates. But the two issues seems unrelated to me, unless I’m missing something.

Perhaps you could sell me on the idea that STEM-types traditionally overestimate all sorts of risks (overpopulation, global warming, job loss, etc.) because they don’t understand economics and give too little weight to how people and markets respond to changing circumstances. Indeed, in my previous post I argued that most non-economists overestimate the “ruin in nations”. Does that apply to AI risk? I don’t know. I don’t understand AI risk well enough to have a sense of whether those economic considerations are relevant to AI risk. I am reluctant to dismiss AI concerns on “STEMs don’t understand economics” grounds because people like Eliezer Yudkowsky most certainly do understand economics quite well.

Probabilistic thinking is unnatural

If the universe is deterministic, then true AI risk is either 0% or 100%. When we use probabilities, it does not imply that events are actually random (although they may be for quantum theoretic reasons), rather it is usually just a reflection of our ignorance.

Go back to the thought experiment at the top of the post. If I guesstimated that X=1000, and that I would have a 99.9% chance at a million dollars, then I might well take the bet. Suppose I do take the bet and win, but afterwards it is revealed that there were only 20 numbers on the roulette wheel. Was it a wise bet? Ex post, it still seems so—but only because I won. Ex ante, it might not have been wise.

If there is a 5% (net) risk of extinction from AI, then the accelerationists are likely to end up being both “right” and “wrong”, ex post. Right in the sense that things will probably turn out well, and wrong in the sense that this risk was probably not worth taking, given those odds and the consequences of failure.

Of course that’s not how people think about things. In our world, people tend to think in absolutes. In the 2020 election, I predicted a very narrow Trump win. The experts predicted a comfortable Biden win, say 4% or 5% in the swing state. In fact, Biden won a very narrow victory, about 1/2% in the swing state. I believe my prediction was more accurate than the experts, but most people would say just the opposite. I got the winner wrong. Who is “right” matters more than who is most rational. Or consider a sports analogy. You predict your team to win by one point when the oddsmakers favor the other team by 20. If the other team wins by one point, who’s prediction was more accurate? It depends on what you care about.

Inside and outside views

I often have both an inside view and an outside view. The inside view is my personal opinion, blocking out what others think. My outside view also incorporates the views of others. Thus, if my inside view is that we’ll have 5% inflation, and the market predicts 3% inflation, then my outside view might be that we’ll have perhaps 3.01% inflation. In other words, I’m an EMH guy and I put a lot of weight on market forecasts.

But if people completely relied on market forecasts, then efficient market forecasts could never form in the first place. Someone must gather the independent information required to make sense of the world. Inside views are necessary. Here I’m saying that I have almost no inside view of AI risk, as more than any other subject I can think of I just don’t understand how AI works. Does it make sense to anthropomorphize AI? I don’t know. Would a superintelligent AI be ethical? I don’t know.

In the past, I’ve found that other people view my inside view as my “real opinion.” That’s not how I think about things. But I’ve learned that I’m not a neurotypical person, and there are times where I almost feel like I’m an “anthropologist on Mars”. Thus, I’m often misunderstood.

I watch the AI debate and wonder how so many bright people can be so confident in their views, even as they disagree with each other. After all, they are looking at the same basic set of facts. People tell me that I should have an opinion on AI risk. Really? What did Socrates say about true wisdom? More likely, the actual problem is that you do have an opinion. [“You” doesn’t mean everyone, just most people.]

I haven’t taken any policy positions on these issues, partly because I wouldn’t even know what sort of policies would be appropriate if AI risk were known to be a serious problem. “Regulation”? Fine, but what sort of regulation is likely to work? Aren’t the leading doom people skeptical that regulation can solve the problem? A pause? Fine, but what’s the plan after that? I guess you could argue that during a pause in AI development we will gradually learn more about how to reduce AI risk, but is that true? Never create an AI that is smarter than humans? My 1970s pocket calculator was smarter at multiplication than I was, and modern LLMs are already smarter than me at most things, even most fields of economics.

I do feel that I’m still smarter than Fable in some limited areas of money/macro, although perhaps I’m just fooling myself. In any case, it’s not clear to me what it means for AI progress to stop before AIs are smarter than us, given that they are already smarter in so many respects.

I raise these objections not to indicate that I disagree with any specific proposal to address AI risk, rather I’m trying to explain why I haven’t gone on record favoring any specific policy. But I’m certainly open to suggestions. If the median expert sees a 5% extinction risk, we’d be crazy to not at least give consideration to some possible approaches to reduce that risk. But I honestly don’t know which approach is best.

And I haven’t even discussed further complications: We don’t even know the specific risks we face because we don’t have superintelligence. The point of the paperclip maximizer was that the problem could come from an unexpected direction. And what about China—would they cooperate? And how does regulating AI affect the pace of medical progress? Would AI create a “post-human world” where people are no longer in charge, and how should we think about that outcome?

So many unknown unknowns.

Please don’t let me be misunderstood

Elsewhere I’ve argued that there is no such thing as “public opinion”, which is based on the notion that there is no such thing as a unified personal identity. Here’s Bryan Caplan:

In particular, if you frame policies as “Government should do more X,” “Government should do less X,” and “Government should stay the course,” public opinion data usually reveals that the latter is the median position. And the main counterexample, category-specific spending, usually goes away if you add a reminder along the lines of “Remember, more spending requires more taxes.”

Do people actually support more spending on education? Yes and no.

The brain has different components, with different opinions. If I’ve just read an essay on AI by Robin Hanson then I’m less worried about existential risk than if I’ve just read an essay by Eliezer Yudkowsky. I’m not smart enough to refute either argument, but neither represent my “actual view”, which doesn’t exist.

A 2022 survey of AI experts found a surprisingly uniform distribution of existential risk estimates from 0.1% to nearly 100%:

At the same time, most superforecasters had views that fit closer to the expected bell-shaped distribution (although a significant minority had very low risk estimates).

Most superforecasters seem to have the ability to adopt the “outside view”. You can think of superforecasters as being people who don’t know whether Hanson or Yudkowsky are correct, and so they put some weight on both views. The “outside view”. In contrast, AI experts presumably rely more on their inside views, which are more widely dispersed. In addition, superforecasters generally have lower risk estimates than AI experts, perhaps because in the past the “nothing happens” forecasting technique has often proved to be quite effective.

Should I put more weight on the views of subject area experts or superforecasters? I’m not sure. Richard Hanania seems to favor expert opinion:

Unlike in my younger days, I am now a certified expert truster. So I don’t feel a need to try to teach myself climatology and look into whether scientists are right when they say the world is getting warmer. Becoming wise means understanding that one of the most useful heuristics one can have is “trust the experts unless there’s something obviously insane about what they’re saying.”

Elsewhere Hanania seems a bit skeptical of the doomer hypothesis.

Should one favor experts on AI or experts on forecasting? This is analogous to the question of the economic impact of climate change—do you favor the views of climate experts or economic experts? In that case, I favor economic experts. But AI is such a weird field that I don’t have much confidence that I know which experts to trust, if any.

To summarize, I don’t “believe” AI extinction risk is 5%. I don’t “agree” with people who make that estimate. Rather, I simply note that this is the reported median estimate of AI experts, and thus a reasonable prior to start with. But I have no reason to assume estimates of 1% or 90% are “wrong”.

I don’t “favor” or “oppose” AI. I am open to policy approaches that boost the present value of expected future utility, but do not know what those policies are. At the moment, virus research is my biggest fear, and AI is something that could accelerate that risk. Or perhaps reduce it. I remain agnostic on AI risk.

Sorry to waste your time on this long “I don’t know”, but I strongly believe the world would be better off if people were less confident in their views.

PS. If you are a conspiracy theorist, please go elsewhere. This blog’s not for you. I’ve personally met lots of experts on both sides, and it’s obvious to me that many if not most of these people have sincerely held views. Not everything in the world is a conspiracy, some opinions are just as they seem. Dean Ball and Alex Tabarrok make this point effectively.

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Delicious — dare I say lickable — hardware never fell out of fashion at Apple. But I think that was, in a very small nut, the core problem with Jony Ive taking control of all design at the company. With a hardware designer in charge of software design, of course the aesthetic changed to one where the software look-and-feel deferred to the hardware. In the 2000s, if you asked me what was more exciting, just to look at, Apple’s hardware or software, I’d have to say “I don’t know.” They both were full of exuberance. They both continued to surprise and delight. Starting with iOS 7, and ever since, the answer is clearly “Oh, the hardware.”

At a first approximation, the problem with Liquid Glass last year is that it just plain sucked. In the way that Donald Trump is a poor idiot’s idea of a rich genius, Liquid Glass exemplifies bad graphic designers’ idea of a good user interface. But looking deeper, the real problem with Liquid Glass is the lack of ambition. Even a good implemention of the ideas behind Liquid Glass — which we’re starting to see Apple incrementally edge toward in this year’s version 27 OS releases — is still fundamentally bland. It aspires only to see-through blandness. The whole point is for the application chrome to defer to “content”, which necessarily results in applications that look shy. They all look alike. Even their icons suck. A good user interface is obvious, consistent, efficient, functional etc. But an insanely great user interface is one that makes you want to use the software not because of what it does but just because it looks so goddamn cool. That’s not instead of actually getting fundamental functionality right. It’s on top of it. But Apple stopped striving for insanely great UIs like that. And, alas, everyone followed. ↩︎

Channel description: “A somewhat poorly named channel which used to constantly upload Sir Mix-A-Lot’s rare videos, music. Now it’s a lot of everything else except that.” He’s got a few other Steve Jobs-era bootlegs, including a 1998 interview about the just-released iMac, in which Jobs is wearing a blue checked button-down flannel shirt, and a 2008 interview about the iPhone 3G and its new features geared toward the business market. ↩︎

Weirdly, this Apple adapter was released last year, but had no hardware that worked with AVS? Wut?

Period	Duration	Years	Growth Rate

Since STS	11 Years	2013-2024	0.0%
Since before Covid	5 Years	2019-2024	0.5%
Latest	2 years	2022-2024	0.7%

To meet STS Goal	26 Years	2024-2050	-0.6%

Model	Input	Cached input	Output
GPT-6 Luna	$0.10/M	$0.01/M	$0.50/M
GPT-5.6 Luna	$0.20/M	$0.02/M	$1.20/M
Grok 4.7	$2/M	$0.50/M	$6/M
GPT-6 Sol	$2/M	$0.20/M	$10/M
GPT-5.6 Terra	$2/M	$0.20/M	$12/M
Claude Opus 5.5	$4/M	$0.20/M	$20/M
GPT-5.6 Sol	$4/M	$0.40/M	$20/M
Claude Fable 5.1	$10/M	$0.25/M	$50/M
GPT-6 Astra	$10/M	$1/M	$50/M

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ARTICLES:

MANUALS and GUIDES:

Earlier volumes:

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Shifting the blame: Sudden change, Car Makers, Consumers and Trump

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ODOT’s April 2026 Draft Monitoring Report

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September 19, 2026

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