Here's a speech I gave on the severe threat posed by AI to young minds. Delivered last year at the @HudsonInstitute, later published in the wonderful @EngelsbergIdeas. Holds up pretty well! In light of recent developments I thought it worth a repost... * I have a warning for you. There is a conspiracy afoot in the land, targeting all of us. The computers in our pockets and the screens all around us have for years paired incredible access to all the world’s information with increasingly ruthless attacks on our capacity for focus, or for what some call ‘deep work’. That’s old news. We all fight this battle every day and it’s important to develop techniques to win it. But there’s something new under the sun that is far more destructive – and especially for you, the young, who are still in the thick of education, perfecting the ability to reason and really (shocking as it may seem) just at the start of a journey of serious reading and writing that will ultimately reveal, in ten years or so, the questions you ought to be asking. About ten years after that, you’ll begin to have some tentative and decent answers to those questions, the implications and consequences of which you’ll then spend the rest of your life working out. (Or you could work faster than me, I suppose!) Of course, I’m talking about AI – specifically, LLMs, or Large Language Models, and the ways in which students use them. The situation overall is serious like a heart attack—or, maybe more appropriately, like a stroke, because the threat is to your mind. And it is a deadly threat. The life of your mind is at stake. Let me explain. One of the most depressing conversations I’ve had in the last year was with a former colleague of mine at the United States Naval Academy who now occupies a position of real responsibility at that school. This person is a brilliant, cultured, well-meaning patriot who only wants the best for the young officers in training there. I was genuinely shocked when this person told me that humanities departments at Annapolis would be incorporating the use of AI into class writing. After all, the students were all using AI for assignments anyway, and would be ‘writing’ this way when they got out into the world, so the practice may as well be brought into the light. The students should, as it were, train as they fight. To this, I responded that we should just save time: the students could use AI to write the papers, and then the faculty could use it to grade them, and everyone could knock off to the bar early. Slightly more seriously, I said: I think I must have misunderstood the purpose of student papers when I was teaching at the Navy. I didn’t think the goal of classroom writing was for students to produce the best possible papers using any available tool. If that was our goal, well, we were failing, spectacularly. I thought the goal was for students to practise writing – and for the faculty to read the papers (sorry to break it to you, but this is hardly any teacher’s favourite chore) so that we could give advice and some accountability. The goal was for the students to become better writers, in time. Why did we expend all that effort? Why does writing matter so much? There is, of course, a practical and superficial argument, that persuasive writing is important for your career. I recently heard a senior retired officer regale a classroom with tales of his bureaucratic victories securing resources within the Pentagon and point out that he basically won – and here I am quoting directly – because he ‘wrote a better essay’ than his opponents. This kind of thing matters. Clear and persuasive writing, in my experience, is essential to career success. Of course, you might respond: well, if I can get the AI to write clearly on my behalf, doesn’t that get the job done just as well? Indeed, if I don’t think I’m the strongest writer in the first place, wouldn’t it be an enormous advantage? And here, folks, lies the road to catastrophe. I genuinely wish I were kidding. An old professor of mine, in my freshman year, once said something wise and important to a seminar I was in when one of my classmates observed that ‘I know what I think, I just can’t get the words down on the page.’ My teacher responded: ‘Well, you don’t actually know what you think, then. The act of writing the thing is the same thing as the thinking of it. If you can’t write it, you haven’t actually thought it.’ Which is to say that writing and reasoning are effectively identical activities – and for many years now, writing has been the way we have taught young people how to reason. To be clear, we are already in a Bronze Age on how we go about such education. If you want to see what the Gold or Silver ages looked like, go look up class syllabi for high schools from a century or two centuries ago. You can do it on your phone. The substitution of AI for the level of instruction remaining threatens to take us from a Bronze Age right through Tin and then on, quick smart, into the abyss. Perhaps our best hope will be that, ultimately, AI will suffer model collapse because, as no one will be producing anything intelligent anymore, AI will have only other AI products to read, and the whole thing will get even dumber until it falls apart. (This concern, model collapse, is a real thing, and the engineers trying to sell you these products are very concerned about it.) I do worry about what it will do to human nature in the interim, though. Okay. You might say all of this is a little overwrought. After all, technological change has regularly altered human nature, just as it increased man’s power and our access to pleasure. So, what’s the big deal? Indeed, technological progress is co-eval with homo sapiens itself. It seems to have been the mastery of fire that improved our digestion and allowed for our larger brains – and, in so doing, set us on the road to being less brawny and strong as a species. Seems like a fair trade to me. What Luddite would want to stay an ape? Another interesting example is the proliferation of cheap paper and especially the invention of the printing press, before which educated elites were trained in elaborate mental exercises to build vast imagined ‘memory palaces’, so as to store the vast amounts of information a learned person would need, as libraries were exceedingly rare and, by modern standards, very poorly stocked. No one has really needed an amazing memory for some time now. Was the trade worth it? I don’t particularly want to go back to a world without books, so I’ll allow it. What about the ability to record and distribute and broadcast music? That’s an interesting one. When I pick up a novel about a domestic subject written more than a century ago, inevitably at some point in the story a family gathers and makes music together – after all, there wasn’t that much to do. Now, I expect that a lot of that living-room music was pretty bad – especially considering that I could play for everyone over the mic right now Maria Callas or Yo-Yo Ma or whoever, and we could listen to some of the most transcendent music ever performed. But here we are arriving at my point: it wasn’t actually the listening to the music that really mattered. It was the making of the music, and the centrality of that activity to being human – which is, today, much diminished. What an irony. We live today in an utterly aurally overstimulated world. There is music, much of it very fine, everywhere. And we are as unmusical a species as we have been since shortly after we gained control of fire. Now we have technology that, in essence, is promising to supplant the core and foundational human activity – that of thinking. And if it is a bit sad that human beings are simply less musical than we used to be, this threat is much more serious. Freedom is, in the first and most essential place, intellectual freedom – the ability to reason clearly, to navigate received opinion and accreted prejudice so as to pursue and sometimes even catch knowledge of things that matter. This activity, when directed at the things that matter most, is called philosophy. It’s a kind of hunt, sometimes pursued in cooperation with others, racing in bands across the limitless plain after our quarry – but in the moment of the kill, we all must kill alone, for ourselves. The hunt for wisdom requires, of course, basic reasoning skills and ideally wide exposure to high-quality efforts of others to reason about things that matter. It requires learning. Generative AI thus presents a double threat: first it tempts you by offering to unburden you of your need to reason, the tedium of organising your thoughts. But, almost as bad, it also scrapes the brain of human civilisation of all information and all learning ever and then, apparently, reduces it all to unvariegated mush, spitting out to you its tawdry imitation of thinking – insipid, composite accounts that I would say are written at a 10th-grade level but for their uncanny alien quality that is not quite like anything human at all. This problem is connected to challenges in foreign policy and implicates, well, our whole national destiny. I think I will find little disagreement that the core purpose of a free society’s foreign policy is the preservation of that free society. That freedom depends not just on our wealth and happy geography and the strength of our arms – though these are vital – but also on wise discernment among our leaders, which is itself a function of the discernment of our citizens. But this discernment, which in this context we might call strategic thinking or just ‘strategy’ as such, is an intellectual activity not dissimilar from philosophy, though its objects are different. Philosophy is the hunt – that race across the plains – for wisdom, whereas strategy is the search for advantage. Both things are ultimately, however, human activities. Philosophy and strategy are not things that you know. They are things that you do. If we cannot reason and if we have had no exposure to wise teachers – often in the form of their writings – we cannot strategise or philosophise – and we will no longer be able to maintain our freedom. Our only consolation will be that we will no longer deserve it. What an astonishing moment in human history, when the long story of our species – the whole history itself of reason and technology – concludes with self-destruction unfolding from the very principle that has defined the species from the start. The threat posed by this new technology is even more concerning than the splitting of the atom, because what has come to market first is not a bomb that can kill cities, but a much more subtle and much broader-based attack on the very substance of our humanity. What are you to do? As individuals? I have some thoughts about the reforms institutions and universities should undertake. They must redo their schedules to allow for in-class writing and ‘blue book’-style assessments, in the spirit of the Oxford exam schools. Embracing oral examinations as a part of reassessment will help, too. But for a room of talented, curious, and committed individual patriots such as you – how should you respond? I’ll close with this. It may be the case that there are some practical individual uses of AI that are not pernicious. But I advise you to be completely radical. You young people, right here, are what we are depending on. Your country depends on you thinking for yourselves – on actually doing the reading, formulating your own thoughts, doing the work. On being a reader and a writer, not just seeming like you have a brain. For any use of these new tools that takes the place of your own genuine understanding – which, I fear, is most of their uses – reject the crutch. To quote an old classmate of mine, if you haven’t started using these tools, don’t. If you have started, stop. Freedom starts at home. It starts in your mind. It, too, is an activity, not a possession. Don’t give up the race.

In response to the clip going around with the African lady saying 'WHAT WHITE CULTURE!?!' Because I can explain it in more detail than anyone else... here are the main things that create western civilisation. The principle, the law of nature that is an adaptation to and what operation it creates in our civilisation. THE WESTERN CIVILISATION STACK Western civilisation can be understood as a set of adaptations to the laws of nature that allow millions of people to cooperate, solve problems and innovate together. 1. SOVEREIGNTY — Let people act. Law of nature: Knowledge and ability are distributed among individuals. No ruler or institution can know everything everyone knows. Sovereignty gives people freedom to choose, experiment and solve problems for themselves. That creates millions of independent problem-solvers instead of waiting for one authority to find the answer. 2. RECIPROCITY — Don’t impose your costs on others. Law of nature: Cooperation survives when it benefits both sides. Freedom cannot mean freedom to steal, defraud, injure or force others to carry your costs. Reciprocity means pursuing your interests while respecting the same right in others. It turns conflict into cooperation and makes peaceful life among strangers possible. 3. RESPONSIBILITY — Make people accountable for consequences. Law of nature: Every action produces consequences. Freedom works when the person making a decision also bears responsibility for its results. When people can keep the benefits of their choices while forcing the costs onto others, cooperation breaks down. Responsibility reconnects choice with consequence. 4. PROPERTY — Make control and consequences clear. Law of nature: Resources are scarce and cannot satisfy every competing use at once. Property establishes who controls something, who may use or exchange it, and who bears the consequences of those decisions. That reduces conflict, encourages people to improve what they possess, and makes investment and long-term planning possible. 5. TRUTH — Correct error faster than reality punishes you for it. Law of nature: Reality does not change because we believe something false. Truthful testimony, open criticism and evidence allow people to discover mistakes before those mistakes become catastrophes. A civilisation that can criticize and correct itself can learn faster than one that protects comforting falsehoods. 6. CONTRACT — Make cooperation possible across time. Law of nature: Cooperation requires predictable future behaviour. Promises backed by reputation and law allow strangers to trust one another enough to cooperate. Contract lets one person invest today because another can credibly promise performance tomorrow. That makes enormous networks of specialization, trade and investment possible. 7. RULE OF LAW — Replace arbitrary power with predictable rules. Law of nature: People have conflicting interests, and power creates opportunities for predation. Law provides a common procedure for resolving disputes without violence or personal rule. When rulers and citizens are both constrained by known rules, people can cooperate, invest and experiment without constantly fearing arbitrary interference. 8. DUE PROCESS — Test accusations instead of trusting authority. Law of nature: Human beings are biased, mistaken and sometimes dishonest. An accusation is not proof. Evidence, defense, confrontation, impartial judgment and appeal create an adversarial process for discovering error. Due process protects both society from wrongdoing and individuals from arbitrary punishment. 9. DECENTRALISATION — Let many solutions compete. Law of nature: No one knows in advance which adaptation will work best. Families, firms, towns, institutions and governments can try different solutions to different problems. Failures can remain local while successful solutions spread. Decentralisation therefore turns society itself into a continuous experiment. 10. MARKETS — Let reality select among competing solutions. Law of nature: Evolution advances through variation, selection and retention. Markets allow people to try different products, services and ways of organising resources. People select among them through voluntary choice. Successful solutions attract resources; unsuccessful ones disappear or improve. Markets turn millions of choices into continuous social learning. 11. SPECIALISATION — Let differences become advantages. Law of nature: People differ in knowledge, ability, resources and circumstances. Instead of everyone doing everything badly, specialization lets people become exceptionally good at different things and exchange the results. Cooperation converts human differences from a source of conflict into a source of increasing productivity. 12. SCIENCE — Institutionalise error correction. Law of nature: A false model eventually fails when tested against reality. Science turns doubt into a productive institution: observe, propose, test, criticize, replicate and correct. Knowledge therefore does not have to depend upon authority or tradition. Every generation can discover where the previous generation was wrong and build upon what it got right. 13. CAPITAL — Preserve successful adaptations. Law of nature: Progress compounds only when successful adaptations survive. Tools, businesses, infrastructure, institutions and knowledge allow yesterday’s successful experiments to become tomorrow’s starting point. Each generation does not begin again from zero. It inherits accumulated solutions and adds another layer. 14. EDUCATION — Transfer accumulated knowledge between generations. Law of nature: Individuals die; knowledge does not have to. Writing, schools, apprenticeships and universities allow discoveries to survive their discoverers. Instead of every generation rediscovering mathematics, engineering, medicine and law, it begins with thousands of years of accumulated learning. 15. COMMONS — Build things that make everyone more capable. Law of nature: Cooperation can produce benefits no individual could produce alone. Courts, roads, standards, security, scientific knowledge, infrastructure and trustworthy institutions multiply everyone's ability to act. A successful civilisation does more than protect private interests: it continually creates shared capital that makes future cooperation cheaper and more productive. THE RESULT These principles form a system: Sovereignty creates experimentation. Reciprocity makes it peaceful. Responsibility makes it sustainable. Property makes interests clear. Truth corrects error. Contract creates trust across time. Law suppresses predation. Decentralisation preserves alternatives. Markets select successful solutions. Specialisation multiplies productivity. Science accelerates discovery. Capital preserves what works. Education transmits it. Commons multiply everyone's capabilities. That is the deeper logic of the Western stack: Stable rules + distributed freedom + relentless error correction = cooperation at scale and accelerating innovation.

Beijing just answered Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Not with a pause. With a warning. On Saturday, Amodei called for the industry to “pace the frontier”: slow the jump in model capabilities so safety work can catch up, put independent evaluators inside frontier labs, and keep U.S. restrictions on advanced chips and model distillation aimed at China. He warned that recursive self-improvement and misaligned agent swarms could outrun control within months. By Monday, Beijing had replied on two tracks.State-backed Global Times called the essay a hypocritical “Cold War playbook” designed to curb China’s AI, lock in U.S. dominance, and shut China out of global rules. Then Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun, asked about the proposal, said “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest.” He did not accept or reject the lab-evaluator plan point by point. He rejected the frame. That is the real split. Amodei treats verification plus chip controls as how you buy time without handing the lead to an authoritarian rival. Beijing treats the same package as containment sold as ethics.

What are China’s biggest concerns about AI? A new article by Chen Yixin, China’s Minister of State Security, in the latest issue of China Cybersecurity Magazine offers some revealing clues. Chen identifies six major risks: 1. Regime security. Hostile forces and people with ulterior motives can use deepfakes, AI-generated text and images, and automated online accounts to cheaply and massively produce political rumors, spread harmful information, and incite social divisions—waging “public-opinion wars” and “cognitive warfare” against China and directly threatening its political, institutional, and ideological security. 2. Critical infrastructure. AI can enable countries and organizations to rapidly discover vulnerabilities, automatically chain together attack paths, and carry out sophisticated hacking operations, dramatically lowering the technical barriers and costs of cyberattacks against China’s critical information infrastructure. 3. Data leakage. Foreign intelligence agencies can use AI-powered web crawlers, data mining, and profiling to collect sensitive information, including critical national data, trade secrets, and citizens’ personal information. Chinese users who process sensitive information through foreign AI products or export data abroad could also cause large-scale data leaks. 4. Closed technological ecosystems. Countries with advantages in AI theory, model architecture, and computing power may invoke “national security” to impose technology controls, entity lists, monopolize technical standards, and build closed-source ecosystems, restricting other countries’ access to advanced technologies and fragmenting global AI supply chains. 5. Structural challenges to social governance. AI creates new uncertainties for social governance and public order. Algorithmic “black boxes” and data poisoning can amplify existing social biases; misuse of personal information can trigger crises of public trust; automated decision-making creates difficult questions of accountability; and the rapid development of AI is increasingly outpacing existing laws, ethics, and regulatory mechanisms. 6. A fundamental transformation of warfare. AI is pushing warfare into an era of “intelligentization.” Whoever can use algorithms to achieve more precise sensing, judgment, and targeting will gain the initiative on the battlefield. AI is moving from an auxiliary role to a central one in intelligence fusion, decision support, target identification, combat operations, and cognitive warfare. And what is the solution? Chen’s answer is revealing: strengthen “Party control over the internet” and “Party control over data,” and “transform the advantages of Party leadership into the effectiveness of AI governance.” In other words, from the CCP’s perspective, the central question is not simply AI versus no AI. Nor is it even fundamentally a contest between the US and China. It is a contest between the US and the CCP over who gets to control AI, data, information, and ultimately the future of society. And whoever wins that contest will decide the future of humanity. mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jsc97cKVY…

Dario is right

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We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did. - Thomas Sowell

Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today? - Thomas Sowell