“Video and transcript of talk on ‘Can goodness compete?’” by Joe Carlsmith

(This is the video and transcript of a public talk I gave at Mox in San Francisco in July 2025, on long-term equilibria post-AGI. It's a longer version of the talk I gave at this workshop. The slides are also available here.)

Introduction

Thank you. Okay. Hi. Thanks for coming.

Aims for this talk

So: can goodness compete? It's a classic question, and it crops up constantly in a certain strand of futurism, so I'm going to try to analyze it and understand it more precisely. And in particular I want to distinguish between a few different variants, some of which are more fundamental problems than others. And then I want to try to hone in on what I see as the hardest version of the problem – and in particular, possible ways good values can have inherent disadvantages and competition with other value systems. For [...]

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Outline:

(00:30) Introduction

(00:50) Aims for this talk

(01:54) Basic vibe

(03:28) Lineage of concern

(04:31) What I mean by goodness

(07:23) What I mean by competition

(09:27) Can \*humans\* compete?

(11:21) Some distinctions

(14:17) Alignment taxes

(16:52) More fundamental variants

(18:24) Negative sum dynamics

(20:36) The strategy stealing assumption

(21:59) Locust-like value systems

(25:47) Other ways the strategy stealing assumption might fail

(28:43) Addressing failures of the strategy stealing assumption

(32:05) Is preventing/constraining competition in this way even possible?

(34:11) Is preventing/constraining competition in this way desirable?

(36:36) What is a locust world actually like?

(38:03) Might a locust world be less bleak than this?

(44:15) Current overall take

(45:33) Poem: Witchgrass

(47:51) Q&A

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First published:
July 17th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/evYne4Xx7L9J96BHW/video-and-transcript-of-talk-on-can-goodness-compete

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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