Does Ranked Choice Voting Work? Plus, New AI Predictions

Transcript

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Speaker 1 Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Konakova.

Speaker 3 And And I'm Nate Silver.

Speaker 1 Nate, we are both in Vegas, so we're going to start the show off with a little update of how our first week of the World Series has been going, whether we are still as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as we were this time last week.

Speaker 1 And then we'll talk a little bit of politics, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, we'll talk about ranked choice voting, its implications for the Democratic mayoral primary, which is coming up in New York, as well as a little bit more abstractifying that in terms of is this a good system?

Speaker 3 What does it reward or punish? And then we'll talk about AI a little bit. I know a frequent topic on this show.

Speaker 3 I was recently at the Manifest Conference in Berkeley, California, before I came out here to Vegas.

Speaker 3 A little bit of an update on the AI 2027 report, which we talked about on a previous episode, and just kind of how we're feeling about P doom and kind of how the Silicon Valley community is adjusting to the constant developments in the sector.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing what you learned at that conference. But let's start a little closer to home and talk about P Doom of our bankrolls.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 WSOP, how has week one treated you, Nate?

Speaker 3 So I have fired 15 bullets. I know it's a violent metaphor.
We're not super PC here, but a bullet in a poker term is like an entry into a tournament, right?

Speaker 3 So I probably entered 10 tournaments, but because you can enter some multiple times, I've had 15 entries into those 10 tournaments.

Speaker 3 Of those 15 entries, I've had three caches or 20%, which is pretty typical, right? You typically cache, depending on the tournament, 12 to 15% of the time.

Speaker 3 So I guess a little bit above average, right? However,

Speaker 3 here's why it's hard to make money in the short run, the medium run in poker tournaments, right?

Speaker 1 In the short run, the medium run, and the long run.

Speaker 3 In the long run, period.

Speaker 3 Number one, even if you outlast 95%

Speaker 3 of people, you often only make roughly like two times or maybe more than that, right?

Speaker 3 So if you invest $1,500 in a tournament and you make it to like the 94th percentile, the prize might be 4,500.

Speaker 3 so net of the 1500 you paid to enter right if you entered twice and like so like basically it's a very top heavy structure where you have to get into like the top two percent or you have to run good and cash in the more expensive events right so the cashes i have are in an 800 event 1500 event a 1100 event i also entered a ten thousand dollar event that like quick exit three thousand dollar event quick exit right you have those basically either have to run really really deep or have your caches be in your higher buy-in events.

Speaker 3 I've done neither. Therefore, I can say, oh, I have cash plenty.
I've been in the running, been in the mix, but like still down money. And that's often very typical.
How about you?

Speaker 3 How about you, Maria?

Speaker 1 So I have not played nearly as many live events as you. I only have one live cash.

Speaker 1 So that was the first event that I played,

Speaker 1 the 800. Then I played the $3,000 freeze out and did not cash that.
And the Monster Stack, as you know, Nate, that did not go well for me. That was one of the ones that you cashed.

Speaker 1 And then yesterday I played the $3,000.

Speaker 1 Basically, it was a turbo, and you played that as well. And neither one of us cashed.
Luckily, I only had to fire one bullet.

Speaker 1 I was unable to rebuy, so that's good. That saved me $3,000.
However, what has kind of saved my last week is online.

Speaker 1 So I fired a few of the online events, came in 57th out of like 1,200 or so in one of them for about $3,000. And then last night came in seventh

Speaker 1 in a $315 event or $320. And that was very bittersweet because seventh was about $7,000,

Speaker 1 which is a great ROI. I was only in for one bullet, right? You pay $320 and you get $7,000, which is amazing.

Speaker 1 First, as you know, would have been a lot more. And I was very proud of myself for getting that far because I had an incredibly short stack basically the entire time.

Speaker 1 I just kind of never had chips to work with and I ended up making it quite far. But that kind of saved my week a little bit because live has not been going well.

Speaker 1 Well, it's been going, you know, it's a tiny sample size, right? This is kind of what you have to understand, that you need to kind of...

Speaker 1 think of things in in a bigger picture as opposed to to just saying oh i've only because i've only played four live events right

Speaker 1 so so the fact that I, yeah, so the fact that I cashed.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't, I don't like, I haven't liked the online. I, I've kind of sworn off online poker maybe

Speaker 1 for yeah, but yeah, there, there are definitely issues with online, but it's, it's helped, it's helped me stay more even than negative for, for the first week.

Speaker 3 The default experience at the World Series poker is you're always like one or two contingencies away from having like a really great World Series and one or two contingencies away from having a really bad World Series, right?

Speaker 3 You know, I

Speaker 3 made it to the very end of day two of the monster stack. You are in the money, right? And then I made a

Speaker 3 huge semi-bluff. If you don't follow at home, a semi-bluff is when you are hoping to get the opponent to full, but if not, then you have a good draw that will win sometime.

Speaker 3 So I had basically a straight flush draw and it was a turn. So you now have only one card to make your hand.

Speaker 3 And the opponent I thought was pretty strong, but I thought the odds compelled this play and I, whatever, I'm there to, I'm there to run deep. I'm earning the money.

Speaker 3 I went for it. He had a set of queens.
I didn't make mud.

Speaker 1 That was not going to fold. Yes.
There's, it's funny. You say you, it felt like the opponent was strong.

Speaker 1 And I think we've all had that feeling, you know, where like just based on the way someone's playing, based on kind of the dynamics of the hand, you know the person is strong, but they're strong and they're strong, right?

Speaker 1 A set of queens is a hand that's probably not going to fold. If you had like naked top hair, something like that, that might fold.
And it's hard.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it's hard to know the difference, but you had a straight flush draw.

Speaker 1 I think that you have to go for it in that situation. And Nate, you and I are playing for the win, not for the Mincache, right? We're playing to get chips and to win this thing.

Speaker 1 So let's do it and let's have a better update for our listeners next week. So, Nate, let's turn to a totally different topic.
Let's go politics and talk a little bit about ranked choice voting.

Speaker 1 This is, correct me if I'm wrong, the second election in New York City where the voting has been changed so that now we are in a situation where we have ranked choice voting instead of the usual first pass the post system.

Speaker 1 So let's let's talk just a little bit about what the differences are.

Speaker 3 I am correct, right?

Speaker 1 This is the second election where this is in play.

Speaker 3 Correct. Yeah.
Only for the primary. Yes.
Actually, it's not used in the general election, which could also be chaotic.

Speaker 1 We'll probably get to that later on yep all right so um normal you know first past the post person who gets the most votes wins right um and there can be runoffs if no one gets the requisite majority in ranked choice voting it doesn't quite work the same way you get to rank your candidates in order you know is it one two three four five how however many ranked choices you have in a given election there's um every every election is a little bit different so let's let's pretend that we're voting for our favorite podcasters and just a random, random example.

Speaker 1 And let's imagine that

Speaker 1 a bunch of people get lots of votes. And I, when you tally

Speaker 1 everyone up, I, Maria, come in last. So I am going to be cut because the last person who comes in with, you know, the fewest votes is going to be cut.
But what's going to happen to... my ballots?

Speaker 1 Well, I'm going to be cut, but the people who ranked me, who wanted me, who ranked me first, whoever they ranked after me is going to get all of those votes.

Speaker 1 So imagine that everyone who voted for me actually put Nate after me, right? And when you cut me

Speaker 1 between the people who voted for Nate first and the people who voted for Nate after me, all of a sudden, Nate has lots and lots of votes. And that's how ranked choice voting works, right?

Speaker 1 Your votes get redistributed. Nate, congratulations.

Speaker 3 I've given you all of my votes.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you're going to be zooming up those podcasts.

Speaker 3 I got eliminated, though. My votes got redistributed to Ezra Klein apparently

Speaker 3 damn it

Speaker 3 we tried we tried

Speaker 1 but that's actually so you know we joke but there is a lot of strategy there you know there are pros there are cons and there's also strategy that comes up with ranked choice voting where people and this has actually played out in elections in the past where people do have coalitions and try to say okay like let's try to band together so that if we're you know if one of us is eliminated our votes get passed to the other person so that's kind of ranked choice in a nutshell.

Speaker 1 Nate, the last time this was used in New York City, it was a little bit of a disaster.

Speaker 3 Well, it depends on who you would ask, right? So you had Eric Adams, who's a former cop in the conservative lane of the Democratic primary, not conserved relative to the U.S.

Speaker 3 overall, but there are actually a fair number of... conservatives who are Democrats in New York because there's no point in being a Republican.

Speaker 3 So therefore, you know, like 15% of New York City Democrats voted for Trump, which is much higher than nationwide.

Speaker 3 You had Maya Wiley, who's the progressive candidate, and you had Catherine Garcia, who was at the time, I believe, the sanitation commissioner, who was like the competent technocrat, right?

Speaker 3 So what ranked choice voting is sort of theoretically supposed to do is produce a consensus.

Speaker 3 choice where yeah the left likes wiley the right likes adams and the center again relative to the new york electorate likes garcia however you know in principle you could have what's called the condorcet winner it's a french political scientist i believe somebody somebody Condorcet, where like, let's say Garcia, because she's in the middle, that all her voters, so if she were head-to-head against Wiley, she wins because both the moderates and the conservatives prefer her.

Speaker 3 If she's head-to-head against Eric Adams, she wins because like all the moderates and the progressives prefer her, right?

Speaker 3 However, if the previous round is like, if she's stuck in the middle in third place, if it's, you know, 40% Adams, 40%

Speaker 3 Wiley, again, conservative progressive, 20% Garcia, then she's eliminated before she has a chance to beat the other candidates one-on-one.

Speaker 3 What actually happened is she just barely beat Wiley in the penultimate round

Speaker 3 and then just barely lost to Adams in the final round, right?

Speaker 3 And so what you almost had happen is that the candidate who would have been the winner head to head almost got eliminated because she didn't have enough like first choice votes after other votes were redistributed.

Speaker 3 I know that sounds kind of crazy, but number one, I want to emphasize that like, you know, one thing that helped her was that she had agreed with Andrew Yang, who at one point had been the frontrunner and then faded out.

Speaker 3 You know, we're going to mutually endorse one another, right? It's a big burden on voters to have to list five candidates. Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, so we've talked a lot on the show about cognitive load, right? Like how many things you can keep in mind. Like we're busy people.
People's attention is an incredibly finite resource.

Speaker 1 Like just how much of your time are you investing in following politics and following all the candidates, you know, and trying to get into the weeds and kind of figure out, okay, who stands where?

Speaker 1 Who do I believe in? It's much easier to say, oh, okay, like I like this guy or this woman, right? Than to say, okay, this in order, these are my five preferences.

Speaker 1 And so, and people can get confused as well, right? If they don't quite understand how ranked choice voting works, they might think that it's like, oh, I'm giving points, right?

Speaker 1 Because, you know, sometimes you have these voting systems where you allocate different points to different people, and that's just basically how it works, right?

Speaker 1 Like, oh, I gave most of my points to Nate, I gave second most points to Maria, like, and everyone's going to get those points tallied up. That's not how ranked choice voting works.

Speaker 1 But people sometimes, they, you know, especially if you've never done it before, it is, it can be confusing.

Speaker 1 It seems straightforward, rank five, but it's not because ranked voting systems do differ, and we're not used to it, right?

Speaker 1 We're not used to the system where like, I don't know any other voting in your life where you vote and like your votes get redistributed to your second choice, right?

Speaker 1 Like that's, that's not something that you, that's not a situation you commonly encounter.

Speaker 1 And so unless like you know and you can think through the strategy of, okay, what does that mean for how do I rank candidates? Then you can get an outcome that you didn't actually mean to happen.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, there are systems, there are alternatives, like one is called approval voting, where you just list as many, you vote for as many candidates as you want, right?

Speaker 3 As many candidates as you like, you think it would be a good mayor, a good president, whatever. Just check the box.
Like, that's a little bit more straightforward and not subject to manipulation.

Speaker 3 You know, also, like,

Speaker 3 guess which people take the time to carefully think through their five preferences in New York. You get five listings, right?

Speaker 3 It's the college-educated professional class who read the New York Times in New York, right? And like, and research all the candidates and do their duty. And like, so it kind of like

Speaker 3 quasi-disenfranchises voters that might be struggling a bit more or might not be kind of as news consuming. I'm not sure I like that quite so much, right?

Speaker 3 You know, here, I mean, so to discuss the problem, we have a good freelance article at Silver Bulletin about this last week, right? But like, so one problem is you have like

Speaker 3 Zoran Mamdani, a former or current member of the Democratic Socialists of America, right? So quite left wing, but has left-wing, but has run like a

Speaker 3 attractive campaign. I mean, he has good commercials.
He's a good looking, good-looking guy, right? He has some energy.

Speaker 3 He's young in a political environment where there's too many fucking old people, right?

Speaker 3 You know, is quite far left.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Is quite far left, but has proposals like free bus service, like city-run grocery stores in food deserts, a $30 an hour minimum wage or 35 or really high or something like that, right?

Speaker 3 But like, it's actually stuff that like kind of like poll tests pretty well, like a rent-freeze.

Speaker 3 Like economists hate this idea but like but he has made it a very competitive race against cuomo but there are plenty of voters who think i don't like either one right cuomo hasn't lived in new york in 30 years he's a me too stuff he's a carpet bagger he's domineering we don't want our own trump he eats bagels the wrong way um zoran is is too far to the left people have issues with him on israel if they're pro-israel they have issues with him on on budgeting and taxes and a lack of experience right and you have like all these like technocrats like running in the center lane brad lander adrian Adams, Scott Stringer,

Speaker 3 Ziller Meyery, right?

Speaker 3 You have a hedge funder named Whitney Tilson, I think. And so, like, so you have like all these Technocrats running, and what's going to happen is that like,

Speaker 3 you know, one of the Technocrats will probably finish in third place and be eliminated, even though in principle, you could have like an Adrian Adams or a Brad Lander who would win head-to-head against these two polarizing candidates.

Speaker 1 And we'll be back right after this.

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Speaker 3 Now, the New York Times did something interesting, right? Which is they

Speaker 3 did. Yeah.

Speaker 3 The Times

Speaker 3 declared a year or so ago that we're no longer going to endorse in local races, right?

Speaker 3 Which is bizarre, right? Well, I don't think newspapers should make endorsements. I think it's not that, yeah.

Speaker 1 Fine. So, if you don't think they should make an endorsements, period, that makes sense.
But if they're making endorsements in national elections, if they do, they should do it in local races.

Speaker 3 I mean, even listen to the New York Times endorsed both Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic primary, right? Which did neither any favors, I don't think, right?

Speaker 3 And they do not use ranked choice voting in most states in the primary.

Speaker 3 This time, they're like, don't vote for Zoran and rank Cuomo somewhere, but then like rank like Lander or Tilson first.

Speaker 3 And like, I put, I put the editorial through like different large language models, AI models, right? Some are like, yeah, it's telling you to vote for Brad Lander and then put Cuomo fifth.

Speaker 3 So like, so if it comes down to Cuomo versus Zoran, that he will, he will prevail, right?

Speaker 3 But others were confused, right? These events say yeah, it's like, they kind of say all these mean things about Cuomo and they say to vote for him anyway, right? So very,

Speaker 3 very weird and half-assed. And then Lander has cross-endorsed Mamdani.
And so I, it just kind of like, it adds an element of randomness. Now, to be fair,

Speaker 3 Cuomo is almost certain to win the first choice vote, right? So in a normal Merrill election, because there is kind of an anti-Cuomo, anybody but Cuomo coalition, which is pretty broad, right?

Speaker 3 And have different flavors of it, right? In a normal election, Cuomo just wins. goes to the general election and so forth, right? Here, Mamdani has a decent chance.

Speaker 3 He's at 25 on polymarket where as you probably know i'm an advisor and by the way i was into momdani early i thought like you know here's a guy running a pretty energetic campaign at a moment when like i don't think new york is like suddenly having some like progressive spawn but I think like people are sick of the establishment and and no one's a bigger figure of the establishment than Cuomo, right?

Speaker 3 And he and he, you know, and he's running a campaign that feels a little bit different. And I think in in

Speaker 3 city elections, it doesn't have to be so ideological anyway. Like, I'm to his right, right? I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be terrified by his mayorship by any means at all, right?

Speaker 3 But he's, he's overperformed, Coma's underperformed. As a result, he has a real shot.

Speaker 3 The general election is a mess, however, because like all these candidates basically have vehicles that can run with various minor parties in the general election, right?

Speaker 3 So you'll have already the current incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, is running as an independent. You'll have a Republican candidate, I think Curtis Silba, who's like the former guardian angel guy, right?

Speaker 3 And you could have both, like Momdani, if he loses, could run on the Working Families

Speaker 3 ticket. Cuomo, if you lose, I think there's some special vehicle third party that Cuomo could run.

Speaker 3 So rarely, usually just a matter of the Democratic primary mattering. We're going to have a competitive general election in New York too, it looks like.
And then it's very weird.

Speaker 3 Then you get into things where like, then it's no longer ranked choice voting. And you have Cuomo and Adams have these kind of overlap, right?

Speaker 3 and so you could see like momdani win with a plurality even though he probably would lose with ranked choice voting when you bring the more conservative voters in play than there's probably in anybody but mom buzzo run coalition so it's it's all kind of a mess we like messes in new york maria but this is a particular mess it is a particular mess and you know something that i've seen um that's kind of interesting because normally you know you have people like endorse candidates and say you know this is why you vote for this one in new york because of what happened last time and because people don't quite get ranked choice all the time

Speaker 1 I've been seeing a lot of people instead of saying you know vote for Zoron or or whatever it is

Speaker 1 they say don't rank Cuomo right like that's the messaging has shifted to like just do not put him as any of your top five choices even if you like would marginally like prefer him to to someone else.

Speaker 1 And so that's like game theory,

Speaker 3 game theorifying, how do you do that?

Speaker 1 Game theorifying it to the next level right now, telling people like.

Speaker 1 Don't only rank this person, do not rank this person anywhere because we don't want votes to trickle down there.

Speaker 1 And yeah, so that's, it's kind of an interesting way of figuring out, okay, how do we game this? I'm very interested to see how it all plays out.

Speaker 1 Obviously, I'm not voting in it because I'm a Nevada resident,

Speaker 1 but because, you know,

Speaker 1 I have been a New York resident for for many years and still spend a lot of time there. It is something that is near and dear to my heart.

Speaker 3 And I'm not voting because I am a registered, I think I've told this story on the show.

Speaker 3 I'm a registered Republican in New York because I wanted to register to vote against Donald Trump in 2016, where my vote mattered more. It's very hard to change your vote.

Speaker 3 By the way, we do have some breaking news here. This podcast is not produced in real time.

Speaker 3 One of the mayoral candidates, Brad Lander, the city comptroller, was just arrested outside of an immigration hearing. Say what they did.

Speaker 3 City Comptroller comptroller Brad Lander AM New York was arrested and accosted by massed federal agents at an immigration court in Lower Manhattan is the photo caption I'm reading.

Speaker 3 There is a photo of him looking,

Speaker 3 I don't know, dramatically kind of in like a, I guess not quite a chokehold or is it?

Speaker 3 But he's arrested in a somewhat violent struggle. And

Speaker 3 this is important.

Speaker 3 Because now Brad Lander is a going to generate headlines and now he's a focal point. I mean, now he kind of got the quasi-New York Times endorsement.
And like now Brad Lander is in the news, right?

Speaker 3 That's interesting. That could affect things.
Yeah, I don't know if it was deliberate.

Speaker 1 If it's deliberate, it's incredibly smart because you just mentioned a term that I actually think we should just talk about a little bit when it comes to ranked choice voting, which is focal points, right?

Speaker 1 When you have to rank five candidates, when you have all this cognitive load and it's really difficult to figure out, okay, where do I actually stand? Focal points matter, right?

Speaker 1 So so it's actually incredibly important like who can command the attention who can be in your mind right we have recency effects we have um those those types of biases that like if someone is on your mind for for whatever reason and has like a slightly positive um bent for you might not even remember that it was because of this arrest i mean obviously now you will because it's so close to the election but it will make you much more likely to be like, oh, you know, I have a good feeling about this person.

Speaker 1 I'm going to rank them, even if it actually has nothing to do with the election, right?

Speaker 1 Like, if you think about it, he didn't suddenly become a better or a worse candidate just because of this one thing, but in your mind, something shifts, and all of a sudden, those votes shift as well.

Speaker 1 It's a really interesting psychological phenomenon, which is why, if this was actually on purpose, it's kind of a brilliant strategy. If it wasn't on purpose, it still might actually work out.

Speaker 1 I mean, what's Polymarket saying, Nate?

Speaker 3 So, he's up to 2% from like 0% voting.

Speaker 1 Hey, that's a big, that's a big move in just a few minutes.

Speaker 3 And he's already had, again, this kind of New York Times, they kind of whistied out of making an actual endorsement, right? But they kind of implicitly endorsed him.

Speaker 3 And now, if it's Machiavellian politics, then good job, Brad Lander. You just gave yourself a shot.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 1 you did indeed. Yeah, and this is the kind of stuff that actually ends up mattering because we're human and, you know, this is the way the brain works.

Speaker 3 No, I like just, you know, name recognition is useful, right? Because you want to be listed somewhere, right? Like,

Speaker 3 like, there's tons of Zaran posters up in my neighborhood all over the city. It's like, oh, I know who this guy is.
And

Speaker 3 I like

Speaker 3 Lander or whatever, right? But like, I've heard of this guy and I feel obligated to list five people. And I've heard of this guy.
I'm not going to go for somebody I didn't know. Right.

Speaker 3 So like, so this is it. This is interesting.
Maybe I don't. Yeah.
I'm not quite sure if it's a three-way race now, but like it's well, yeah, we'll see what happens.

Speaker 3 and we'll be right back after this break

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Speaker 1 So, Nate, a few weeks ago, you were at the Manifest Conference and you had some interesting takeaways about AI 2027, which we've talked about on the show before.

Speaker 1 And, you know, before we get into all of that, do you you just want to let our listeners know what exactly the Manifest Conference is? Because it's kind of a big deal in the AI community, right?

Speaker 3 Absolutely. Just a week ago, I mean, it feels like I've been in Vegas for like

Speaker 3 three weeks. It's just been eight days, I think.
It's about eight days. Yeah, time warps.

Speaker 1 Time warps during the World Series of Poker.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 The Manifest Conference is held by a prediction market called Manifold, which is a market where you trade for free, you trade for a world called mana, or kind of like credibility points, basically, but people take it very seriously.

Speaker 3 However, it's like kind of the de facto, and there are other conferences that I don't go to in the Bay Area.

Speaker 3 It's like the de facto grouping of like this overlap of prediction market nerds plus other adjacent people, rationalists, effective alterists. Some listeners will know what all these terms mean.

Speaker 3 If you read my book, there's a big detailed schema of like what these different groups are, right?

Speaker 3 You know, various nerds, there's like a poker tournament tournament there that I participated in some years, you know, it's kind of like effective altruists meet

Speaker 3 degenerate gamblers, right?

Speaker 3 You know, it's sponsored by.

Speaker 1 Sorry, I'm just going to interject. It's not just effective altruists and degenerate gamblers, but I think it was last year's

Speaker 1 manifest conference, maybe the year before, where there was a market on the chances of an orgy happening.

Speaker 1 And then the market went to 100 after the orgy happened.

Speaker 3 So, you know, it's people have fun there. There's lots of stuff.
It's a weird environment, right? You're on this actually quite pretty little campus in Berkeley called Lighthaven, right?

Speaker 3 But like everything kind of takes place inside Lighthaven and like there's like a

Speaker 3 like a cuddle party at some point and there's like a there you go.

Speaker 1 Cuddle party listeners, cuddle party. I have big air quotes in my hand.

Speaker 3 There's all this discussion about like,

Speaker 3 will the world then because of AI? And is that, is that good or bad? Right. It's

Speaker 3 another way of pretty straight list cloud. My friends and I, the Substack crew and I, Substack is a sponsor, as is Polymarket, both of which I am an investor in.

Speaker 3 So I'm over determined to be at this conference. So, you know, we had to like

Speaker 3 sneak some wine in. We're like, you guys should bring out more wine, right? People are socializing here.
You got to bring out some more wine. And it's like mixed crowd.
And like, yeah, it's a very

Speaker 3 interesting, it's weird kind of going from that environment to the poker world where like, I think I kind of half sarcastically talked about it last week, but like the Bay Area

Speaker 3 feels distant to me, right? I don't mean that in a pejorative way.

Speaker 3 I mean like the fact that AI is so top of mind for people and that you have people who think that like we are on the verge of an intelligence explosion or singularity or artificial super intelligence, right?

Speaker 3 These are all like slightly different terms, but that's a commonly held belief in that community, whereas you would venture outside of that community and people would think you were fucking crazy to think that we're going to be building Dyson spheres or whatever

Speaker 3 in a few years, right? And I feel like I'm a little bit of a hinge point between

Speaker 3 the kind of normie crowd and the and the AI tech rationalist crowd, like relative to people at manifest, I'm like, okay,

Speaker 3 I think we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves with assuming that like we are on the verge of artificial super intelligence, right? We can discuss that or not, right?

Speaker 3 And I'm also like, I'm not so sure, like, what the fuck? I mean,

Speaker 3 you know, you're transforming all of society. Shouldn't society get a say in that, even if you think it's good, right?

Speaker 3 Whereas relative to normal people, I think, okay, you're sleeping on the fact that we are maybe on the verge of profound changes, even from artificial general intelligence disruptions to how people live, how people work, certainly,

Speaker 3 how people perceive the world. And so, like, I'm kind of a bridge observation there.

Speaker 3 But, like, yeah, so we talked about the AI 2027 report on this podcast before when it came out, which is a kind of forecast, a scenario kind of somewhere between, they call it like a forecast or a prediction.

Speaker 3 It's like a deterministic prediction conditional on fairly fast AI development and kind of presents one scenario where AI decides that human beings are a threat to its growth and sends out drones and kills every human sometime, I think, in the mid to late 2030s.

Speaker 3 And then one scenario where we agree to de-escalate with China and the world is profoundly transformed into an AI utopia

Speaker 3 that some people might also call a dystopia, but at least we survive as the AI's concubines or whatever we are exactly, right?

Speaker 3 Which apparently they think is the happy ending, right? It was interesting that like at that conference, though, I went to an update and they were kind of pushing back the timelines, right?

Speaker 3 They're like, things are a little bit slower than we thought, right? You know, one big benchmark. So

Speaker 3 AIs that are agentic, that for example, search the web to do tasks, like that's still not implemented. I'm sure it will be at some point, but maybe I should back up, right?

Speaker 3 Like I am skeptical of claims. So the different terms here, right? Right now we have what I would call spiky or patchy

Speaker 3 general intelligence for like desk. jobs, right? Jobs that, you know, we're not near having like an AI plumber.

Speaker 3 We do have AI automated driving but that required and it's pretty good in my opinion but still only in a handful of cities um required a lot of very dedicated devotion to that particular task right that's an important technology right but like so first of all we're mostly restricting this to things in the realm of single manipulation computer remote desk job type of stuff right and that's already kind of patchy there are many things that ai is already much better than humans at but like it can't really can't really search the web it can't really book a flight or make a restaurant reservation for you.

Speaker 3 It can't play poker, can't play chess, right? The image generation capabilities are pretty good, but you know, show some AI artifacts, right?

Speaker 3 But yeah, you know, I think to, you know, what they believe is that eventually AIs will learn to program themselves, right? And you'll have recursive improvement toward

Speaker 3 not just artificial general intelligence, but then artificial super intelligence, right? Where it's discovering things that like human beings have not discovered and,

Speaker 3 you know, become hyper-persuasive. And I am skeptical of this for various reasons, right? One of which I just think it's like kind of like, it's kind of underdetermined, right?

Speaker 3 Like the argument is basically like, hey, look, so far we've been on a, on a, it's actually logarithmic, right? But as you add more compute, you have these scaling laws, laws, quote unquote, right?

Speaker 3 Where as you add more compute, things get more intelligent and it's been a fairly predictable trajectory so far. And so far, the progress is remarkable, right?

Speaker 3 If you had told somebody what ChatGPT or Claude or Google Gemini can do, if you told them that 10 years ago, they'd be fucking amazed that it can do many of these things quite well and some things excellently with natural language.

Speaker 3 And like, they're very, very impressive, right?

Speaker 3 But like, but kind of when it comes down to it, the argument is basically just, and I know I don't sound rigorous, but I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

Speaker 3 They're just like, well, Arrow, line's going up, line will keep going up. And if line keeps going up, then that inevitably means that we pass super intelligence, right?

Speaker 3 And I don't think it's inevitable. The line keeps going up because I've seen a lot of lines that keep going up until they don't.
That's one thing, right? Also, because it's trained on human data.

Speaker 3 And so it seems like if it's trained on human data and has human reinforcement, very importantly, without human reinforcement, these things get pretty wacky, right?

Speaker 3 Basically, I'm very underwhelmed by the case for like how quickly this will transform into the physical world and how quickly it achieves.

Speaker 3 beyond human capabilities. And I feel like a heathen in the AI community to be skeptical about this, but this very long-winded anecdote.
And the other reason too, I'm sorry, I'm babbling on, Maria.

Speaker 3 I mean, I do that sometimes, right? I was thinking like they're not like really describing political constraints.

Speaker 3 Like, you know, Sam Altman wrote an essay that I'm going to probably write about at the newsletter soon,

Speaker 3 where it's like, well, we're going to have a singularity, meaning we have this explosion of new technology and intelligence, right? But it'll all feel pretty normal and we'll cove, right?

Speaker 3 I'm like, no, Sam, no, it's not going to fucking happen, right?

Speaker 3 We're not going to have a fucking singularity where we have as much technological progress in three years as we had in the entire hundreds of thousands of years of human and proto-human species, right?

Speaker 3 And we're just like, oh yeah, shits look different. No one has a job anymore, right? But in, you know, yeah, no, it's not going to be just a gentle singularity.
It doesn't make any fucking sense.

Speaker 3 And the reason why it's useful to go to conferences like Manifest is that you realize that like people are out on a bit of an island. The Bay Area is far away from the rest of the country, right?

Speaker 3 It's a little insular. And so, like, and that affects my views a bit because, like, you're not, I think, sufficiently accounting for like societal political constraints, backlash, and so forth.

Speaker 3 So, I had a great time at the conference, got to connect with people who have, because, of course, I'm with online before they've never met in person. But yeah, that was my experience.

Speaker 3 I went on for like 10 minutes there, Maria. So, it's your turn to tell me what I, what I'm full of shit about.

Speaker 1 No, well, well, I'm not, I'm not sure since I was obviously not at the conference, um, but I'm actually quite curious.

Speaker 1 So, the you know, you said that the authors of the AI 2027 report were there and that they

Speaker 1 have kind of modified their timeline a little bit.

Speaker 1 Did you get a chance to kind of get at whether their thinking has fundamentally changed as well or whether they now just think that, okay, it might be a little bit slower?

Speaker 3 Well, so for one thing, it's a little bit hard to know,

Speaker 3 like, are they making a prediction that they would like bet on

Speaker 3 or are they trying to like

Speaker 3 draw attention to what they view as a plausible scenario?

Speaker 3 And there probably is

Speaker 3 some incentive if you're trying to draw attention to like

Speaker 3 to produce some more dramatic. I mean, it is a story.

Speaker 3 They had Scott Alexander, who is one of my favorite writers, yeah, writes formerly for Slate Star Codex now and Astro Star Codex to like just punch up the writing.

Speaker 3 And it's a beautifully written, interesting document, right? But like, but there's a little bit of like, we want to get attention.

Speaker 3 They, they let me have a chat with them before and gave me a preview of the report, right? And like, so like, I, I think you can probably like

Speaker 3 discount a little bit based on that incentive to like

Speaker 3 paint a more robust picture and not just hedge a bit. And like, I just think that like

Speaker 3 I am becoming increasingly unpersuaded.

Speaker 3 by people thinking that we can make this leap from AGI, which I think people will have things people call artificial general that basically you can do most desk jobs.

Speaker 3 Some people say all desk jobs, right? Let's say you can do the large majority of desk jobs as well or better than the large majority of human beings, right?

Speaker 3 I think that's a pretty safe assumption, hedging now with saying the large majority as opposed to all.

Speaker 3 And then we're not that far from that. Well, we can debate that, right?

Speaker 3 The leap to the physical world and to super intelligence, I just, I've read all these reports. I've talked to lots of people.
I just think they take that too much for granted.

Speaker 3 And I think they need to like treat it as a possibility. But like, I think it's really underdetermined as far as like a persuasive explanation of that for me.

Speaker 3 Conditional upon that, then I think these reports like underestimate like the societal piece and how society resists and pushes back. I mean, like, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, not just resisting and pushing back. I mean, I think this kind of like

Speaker 1 almost dismissive attitude, like what you were saying with Sam Altman, like, yeah, it's going to happen and we'll cope. Like, no, this is going to cause, if it does happen,

Speaker 1 even to some extent, there's going to be massive disruption, right? And it's not going to be peaceful. People do not like their jobs being taken away.

Speaker 1 And, you know, it's interesting because we talked on the show before where there were,

Speaker 1 you know, union workers striking at ports where some of their jobs were getting automated, and that was basically less work for them. And so, technically, it was actually kind of better, but

Speaker 1 practically speaking, they were like, no way, right? Like, you're taking away jobs, you're taking away hours. Like, we don't want this kind of marginal efficiency from these robotic things.

Speaker 1 We want, you know, we want our workers getting money. And they were effective, right? Like, they stopped working.
The strikes actually worked. And that's kind of one, one very small piece of it.

Speaker 1 And in a place where like the disruption, it's not like they were all going to be out of jobs. It was just kind of, it was relatively small.

Speaker 1 Probably didn't feel relatively small to them, but it was a relatively small piece of this larger mosaic.

Speaker 1 But if you get those kinds of protests, even with something like that, imagine the pushback that you're going to get

Speaker 1 in different areas if that starts becoming.

Speaker 3 So we just came off a weekend in which we had mass

Speaker 3 political protests, the no-kings protest, right?

Speaker 3 You have, maybe most importantly of all, Israel bombing Iran

Speaker 3 because of technology, right? I don't want to take a very serious situation and make too cute an analogy, but like here you have technology that like...

Speaker 3 Iran's nuclear program that Israel feels could be threatening to its interest or its global interest, right? And they're bombing the hell out of Iran right now, right?

Speaker 3 So to think that like you're going to have these profound transformations and the world kind of stands idly by, right? And the fact that people kind of of in what I call the river, right?

Speaker 3 The DC types are often clueless and dismissive about AI. That's actually a reason to think that the political reaction is not priced in, right?

Speaker 3 It's counterintuitive, but because eventually it will be.

Speaker 3 People when they're when their jobs, if and when, if and when, if and when their jobs are threatened, if and when it profoundly rebalances power, if and when it potentially makes the US and China be huge hegemons relative to the rest of the world.

Speaker 3 It's already the two superpowers, but if now Europe and the Middle East and everyone else is behind, right? Like, what's that going to mean? And so, like, yeah, not wrestling.

Speaker 3 And there are two ways to read that. One way to read it is that, like, okay,

Speaker 3 that means they're not pricing in the constraints, society, the legal system,

Speaker 3 resource constraints. It just kind of seems incongruous.
to have this world where the Middle East is at war. Who knows when China and Taiwan will go to war? Ukraine's still at war, right?

Speaker 3 Democracy, I don't want to be overly dramatic, right? But like,

Speaker 3 but, you know, Trump presents certain threats to the U.S.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and it's like, you know, global war. It's like kind of, what are we,

Speaker 3 it's not going to be a smooth singularity.

Speaker 1 No, I mean, no, no, none of this is smooth. And I think that you also cannot underestimate humans' survival instinct, right?

Speaker 1 And their kind of their desire not just to survive, but to like, they don't like having things taken away from them.

Speaker 1 And, you know, at some point like this is you know if we if we look at kind of big theories histories of the world like

Speaker 1 none

Speaker 1 none of those transitions were ever smooth right and and people do start rising up and rebelling and we're seeing unrest all over the world and as you say Nate you know climate change all of these things we are not living in a nice peaceful like sunny moment in time where like everything is just going well and people have become complacent we were but but now I think that that complacency is fading and a lot of that angst and frustration is boiling up in different ways to the surface.

Speaker 1 So I think that this is, yeah, I think that this is going to be profoundly disruptive. And so we'll just see how that plays out, right?

Speaker 1 Like, and at what point, because I think you made an a good point at the beginning of our conversation about this, that San Francisco is a little bit of an island.

Speaker 1 And I'm putting San Francisco here in quotes because letting it stand in for kind of that community. And it's an echo chamber, right?

Speaker 1 Because you have these people who are all together, all in the same place, going to the same events, talking to each other, reinforcing each other's ideas.

Speaker 1 And when that happens, like that's, that's never good, right?

Speaker 3 Like the

Speaker 1 best things, best ideas, best businesses, best transitions happen where you have more outsiders and people who are open to kind of different views, different backgrounds, you know, just different

Speaker 1 types of people coming together. And that's not what's happening in this little, it is a little bit of a bubble.

Speaker 1 And so I think that that's just really important to keep in mind in terms of what we're seeing now and also what we're likely to see unless something changes.

Speaker 1 Because, you know, unless that bubble pops, like their thinking will still be reinforcing each other for a while.

Speaker 3 Yeah, look, it's frustrating because I don't know as much about AI as most people do, right? And there kind of can be an accusation, well, we spent more time thinking about this.

Speaker 3 Well, I know more about politics than they do, than any of them do, right? And so like, I'm trying to like, I'm trying to serve as a bridge between these two kind of communities, so to speak.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, let's see how it all plays out, Nate. I'm very curious, you know, once you get invested invested, once you get invited to the Manifest Conference next year,

Speaker 1 what happens and

Speaker 1 how that thinking might shift. Let's definitely, you know, I think this is a topic that we come back to often for good reason.

Speaker 1 And I think it's something that we have to keep revisiting revisiting to see what's changed or hasn't changed and how we feel about that.

Speaker 1 On that note, let's leave the world of AI behind and enter our other bubble, Nate, of poker.

Speaker 1 And best of luck to the two of us as we hit the tables this week.

Speaker 1 Let's try to reclaim

Speaker 3 some of our poker glory. Yeah, if there's no poker on the show next week, that means we sucked.

Speaker 1 Yes, if we don't talk about it, you know how it's going.

Speaker 1 Good luck to the two of us tonight. See you at the tables.

Speaker 3 See you, Bertha.

Speaker 1 Let us know what you think of the show. Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.
And by the way, if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, we have some bonus content for you.

Speaker 1 That's coming up right after the credits.

Speaker 3 And if you're not subscribing yet, consider signing up For just $6.99 a month, what a nice price.

Speaker 3 You get access to all that premium content and ad-free listing across Pushkin's entire network of shows.

Speaker 1 Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Konakova, and by me, Nate Silver.

Speaker 3 The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.
Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit.

Speaker 3 Sally Helm is our editor, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

Speaker 1 Thanks so much for tuning in.

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