JB: I wanted to ask you about something else. I think we’re both fans of Mattias Desmet and his book about totalitarianism and he makes the case that we’re in a very vulnerable world where people are very anxious because their emotional states are completely aroused, therefore they’re very vulnerable to manipulation and vulnerable to be taken over almost by mass systems such as a totalitarian system. So, two questions related to that. Do you buy that, that we’re at risk of a kind of almost global totalitarianism? Number one, a techno-totalitarianism I think is the term that is being used out there? And relatedly the other question is some people view this as a kind of cabal, a conspiracy of people who are setting this up, whereas I’m more of the school that it’s not necessarily a kind of almost a cartoonish cabal as much as it’s more related to the ideas you’re putting forward which is that there is a kind of mode of thought out there that if fed sufficiently becomes overpowering and penetrates almost everything that we do. I don’t know what name to give that. Is it a force? Is it a way of thought that has force? But I see it more as it’s not disembodied, it’s part of our being and our marriage to that is what’s actually going to create this totalitarianism should it happen. But what are your thoughts about that? Which is kind of the most frightening scenario, if you wish, of the world we’re in.
IM: Well, on the first point:” do you think that the growth of AI will lead to ever tighter control approaching totalitarianism or becoming frankly totalitarian?” I think yes. It’s very hard to see how we can actually avoid this unless there’s some sort of a breakdown which means that the growth of AI itself becomes limited. I can’t imagine by what that might be. It might be by a societal collapse, it might be running out of resources that can fuel the enormously energy expensive growth of these colossal AI structures. But I do think that yes, it’s a very real threat and hard to see how to avoid it. What I don’t think, and here I would agree with you, I don’t think this is so much, I mean there may be individuals who are psychopathically interested in personal power, control and amassing wealth, I’m sure there must be such people, but I don’t think that this is either the full explanation or the main explanation. I think that it is something that is bigger than the people who think they’re controlling this. So I think the big wigs in Silicon Valley who feel like they’re bringing about something are themselves the puppets of something that they don’t fully understand. They are being controlled as much as anyone else. And it’s interesting that bureaucracy is also like this. I don’t want to waste time but I can tell you a very short story about Oxford. I gave a lecture a couple of years ago over the internet and afterwards the University of Oxford promised to pay me and I was delighted. It was a reasonably decent sum and in the old days, somebody would have put a cheque in the post, job done, and I’d have received it three days later. No, now I had to go online onto a platform and do various things and I found that it didn’t operate in the way that it should do. Never mind that there was somebody who was going to hold my hand through this process, this went on for three months. At the end of the three months the person left and said ‘but don’t worry, there’s someone else coming along who will guide you through the next step and when I got to the next step, I had to go on another platform and at the end of this I was just totally frustrated because I was offered a checklist and I had to tick something in the checklist and there were options for all sorts of things like catering, window cleaning and so on, but there wasn’t one for delivering a lecture or anything like it. Even, you know, teaching which I had thought was one of the purposes of university. So in the end I rang the university chest, which as you know is the finance department of Oxford University, and amazingly enough, and this won’t happen in the future, I got to speak to a real living human being and I said ‘It’s a bit of a nightmare this thing,’ and she said ‘Oh, tell us about it. It makes our lives so much more difficult, it’s so complicated,’ and she said ‘I don’t know what to say.’ I said ‘but I’ve got to tick some box, what do I do?’ And she said ‘Oh, tick any box and we’ll pay you.’ So I ticked window cleaning and soon the money turned up in my account. Now my reason for telling that is that it’s just a very vivid example of what I come across all the time that people in bureaucracies are driven mad by the bureaucracy itself, but yet we think that the answer to this is to have a bit more to remedy the problem with the bureaucracy and this becomes very expensive. One of the things that’s now happened, of course, is that nobody can say that we don’t need a DEI department and then people at really very handsome salaries above those of the people that they’re, as it were, managing like the actual researchers, the professors, the consultant doctors and so on, are appointed and a lot of money goes into this and then of course, the costs of running this thing become greater and so the cost of fees go up and people can’t afford the fees so universities have to recruit rich people from abroad who don’t necessarily clear the normal barriers. The whole thing begins to fragment and fall apart. In the NHS we have no longer enough money to do basic things because everything ‘s become so complicated. There’s so much admin around it. If you could cut through that, you know, it’s just everywhere. So I see that as part of the problem and it’s a bigger problem than the people who are running it, so what is it? Well I think that there is something in us that we can recognise which is a drive towards power. It’s what the Greeks call hubris. It’s the desire to be like the Gods. It’s the desire to be able to say ‘We can do anything, we can make anything.’ And this was always, of course, in Greek tragedy, this is the theme of Greek tragedy that the hero becomes hubristic and as a result there is a catastrophe, literally a downfall and this is how civilizations work, they overreach themselves, they do, they get to believe they can do anything and everything and as a result they become unwieldy, they become less creative, they become more stultified by bureaucracy and eventually they lose morale. I think that’s a very important point because one of the effects of over bureaucracy, or too great bureaucracy is that those who are subject to it’s control lose their morale. And this is the reason it’s not very hard to, why is it so hard to recruit doctors and nurses and police and military people? Because they no longer feel they’ve got any autonomy or respect for them as experts, instead they have to follow procedures set down by a sclerotic bureaucracy. And this is the death of everything except mediocrity and eventually collapse of a civilization.
In case you're interested, during a session with the C's, someone asked about Elon Musk's Neuralink:
ked" her camera 
