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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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SMBC gets this close.

I've been thinking about the Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox recently. From the Wiki, it

argues perfectly informationally efficient markets are an impossibility since, if prices perfectly reflected available information, there is no profit to gathering information, in which case there would be little reason to trade and markets would eventually collapse.

That is, if everyone is already essentially omniscient, then there's no real payoff to investing in information. I was even already thinking about AI and warfare. The classical theory is that, in order to have war, one must have both a substantive disagreement and a bargaining friction. SMBC invokes two such bargaining frictions, both in terms of limited information - uncertainty involved in a power rising and the intentional concealment of strength.

Of course, SMBC does not seem to properly embrace the widely-held prediction that AI is going to become essentially omniscient. This is somewhat of a side prediction of the main prediction that it will be a nearly perfectly efficient executor. The typical analogy given for how perfectly efficient it will be as an executor, especially in comparison to humans, is to think about chess engines playing against Magnus Carlsen. The former is just so unthinkably better than the latter that it is effectively hopeless; the AI is effectively a perfect executor compared to us.

As such, there can be no such thing as a "rising power" that the AI does not understand. There can be no such thing as a human country concealing its strength from the AI. Even if we tried to implement a system that created fog of war chess, the perfect AI will simply hack the program and steal the information, if it is so valuable. Certainly, there is nothing we can do to prevent it from getting the valuable information it desires.

So maybe, some people might think, it will be omniscient AIs vs omniscient AIs. But, uh, we can just look at the Top Chess Engine Competition. They intentionally choose only starting positions that are biased enough toward one side or the other in order to get some decisive results, rather than having essentially all draws. Humans aren't going to be able to do that. The omniscient AIs will be able to plan everything out so far, so perfectly, that they will simply know what the result will be. Not necessarily all draws, but they'll know the expected outcome of war. And they'll know the costs. And they'll have no bargaining frictions in terms of uncertainties. After watching enough William Spaniel, this implies bargains and settlements everywhere.

Isn't the inevitable conclusion that we've got ourselves a good ol' fashioned paradox? Omniscient AI sure seems like it will, indeed, end war.

Thanks for the read, i think Omniscient AI is a long way of. Almost all current ai models "simply" condence known knowledge. Most new discoveries made is finding patterns that we didnt seen before, but where already present. The current AI models have no capacity to think and rationalize. They are just very complex and high dimensional information vectors (that is what the N-amount of parameters mostly are).

Simply said: Just because a LLM knows the relation between certain human words does not mean it it sentient. The models can only repeat what the humans trained them on.