“I keep turning off the machine like blowing out a trick birthday candle”—I love that locution! The machine has a way of reasserting itself indefatigably, doesn’t it?
I think it's incredibly important to understand one critical element.
You've probably seen the quote :
"every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
Nature doesn't say anything about humans, or their machines, being limited to this 'mote of dust'. We need one crucial technology - robots able to manufacture the parts used in more of themselves - and this allows exponential growth.
1. This means in real terms it is possible to have 100x, 1000x, or almost arbitrary numbers of zeros more everything. More manufactured goods, more tools, more housing, more lifespan, more partners, more weapons.
You I think are stuck on the idea that if you automate baking all the bread you create a society where no one can afford to eat, when the underlying limits of NATURE mean actually you just need to tax the tiniest percent of it* - either by government policy or by humans finding new jobs as influencers or something on the margin - for everyone to satisfy their needs.
2. You can disagree that (1) is a good way forward. But the entire edifice - having a sovereign, a US or EU government - requires competitive levels of military force. All the hard power comes from having enough guns, the only reason we can have this conversation is the sovereign protects us through deterrence. To compete in a world where at least one nation is building exponential numbers of robots and exponentially increasing their wealth requires you do the same.
3. And this is where I think we stop leaving parables of an idea like Jesus existing in the 1500s and get to concrete terms. "Every gridlock, every veto, every maddening procedural delay exists because the founders understood that the alternative—consolidated authority, however wise, however benevolent—is the Inquisitor’s chair."
Simply put - this transformation to a 100x or 1000x larger economy - physically looks like covering a large fraction of the lands of the United States, additional nations who will need to sign deals, by carrot or stick, because they physically occupy land in critical places (example : Chile enjoys the Atacama desert and along it's coast is cold ocean. This is where nature wants the largest scale data centers installed, enough for a terrawatt+ of continuous electric power) with equipment.
The rocket launches required to send humans to space in large numbers, or for robots to colonize the Moon, require a huge exclusion zone and essentially continuous launches.
What has to happen politically is for all of those veto points to be abolished. AI models tell me that federalism means the US federal government can itself issue permits, and it has already done so for natural gas pipelines - its why they can exist at all. FERC can bypass all of the veto points, and their enabling legislation CAN be amended to ban the injunction. (meaning that judges cannot issue an injunction, only award monetary damages later)
Near future industry, to support the robots, will need vast solar farms, new UHVDC tranmission lines, even larger sets of data centers likely on the seabed of the pacific ocean off the west coast, and likely a transit system of some kind of high speed automated conveyance, while the highways would be completely full of robot trucks. (overhead monorails, underground vacuum tunnels, probably both)
4. As an attorney you're probably not in favor of point 3. And that's fair. But I want to point out the obvious - China runs on a model where their central authority already is able to do exactly what we do with FERC, but for everything. This is why China has 2/3 of the world's high speed rail, the largest electric power production, and so on. This gives them an enormous structural advantage in the near future.
"So what" you say. "The US military is still the most powerful, and has nukes. We're safe and can take our time". This is unfortunately not the case - war is a game of budget and technology, and every weapon has a counter*. The USA or 'free world' only remains free as long as it can financially afford to keep up with the arms race, and an adversary with 100x the resources is not possible to defend against.
*succinctly, ronald reagans vision of 'safety' against nuclear attack is a matter of scale, scale the USA could not afford in the 1980s.
5. Worth pointing out : if you can increase the size of the economy by 100x, you only need 1% of current tasks to be things only humans can do, whether it's because it requires being a human to do the task, only a human can hold the license, or only a human can express the intent required for an AI to actually do the work. I suspect the balance does work as long as it's any percent at all, but acknowledge it can cause enormous disruption.
I think we're talking past each other, and not because we disagree about facts.
You've read the piece as a parable, a literary costume thrown over an economic argument. It isn't. The Grand Inquisitor isn't my metaphor. He's Dostoevsky's. In The Brothers Karamazov the Inquisitor isn't a villain, he's the believer. He takes your side, and he does it out of love: people can't bear the weight of their own freedom, so someone who loves them takes it off their backs and hands them bread and order in its place. He's right about almost everything. That's what makes him dangerous. Dostoevsky doesn't answer him with a better argument. Christ kisses him and walks out, and that refusal to acknowledge that the Inquisitor has any right to settle the issue is the whole damn thing.
That's what I think your comment misses. You've answered me as though I asked whether there would be enough, and you said, "Yeah." A hundred times, a thousand times more of everything, tax the tiniest percent, every need met. I grant you the math.
But I never asked whether there would be enough. I asked who decides.
Every line of your reply gives the same answer: someone other than me. The people building the machine. The ones who can see from above that the veto points are waste and the injunction should be banned and the friction should go, for my own good and the good of everyone like me.
You're making a calculation. I'm denying that anyone gets to make the calculation for me. I don't think that's status quo bias so much as a fundamentally different frame for understanding what's at issue. The system we have is an imperfect instrument for what I actually care about. I'll be the first to say it needs fixing. The thing I really care about is sovereignty. Mine, yours, anyone's. My position is simple: no one, however brilliant, however well-meaning, however right about the robots, has the right to decide for me how my one life goes. Nor should he have the right to decide on your behalf. Even if you agree with him. *You* should make that call.
The frame you're arguing from can't see that objection, because it isn't a number. It won't get captured by an expected value calculation, so it gets treated as zero. A worldview that prices human sovereignty at zero because it can't put a figure on it is what the essay is about.
Thing is, you're making the Inquisitor's argument. You offer the bread, then the authority, with the Inquisitor's care and his certainty that the rest of us aren't up to the task. He was heartbroken about it too. It didn't make him right. I'd rather do this badly myself than have it done well for me by someone who needs me quiescent, full, and entertained. I cannot abide a philosophy that relegates individual sovereignty to an afterthought.
> I asked who decides. Every line of your reply gives the same answer: someone other > than me. The people building the machine. The ones who can see from above that >the veto points are waste and the injunction should be banned and the friction should > go, for my own good and the good of everyone like me.
Specifically I believe the priority order is nature, federal sovereign, state sovereign, local sovereign, individuals.
Nature - not the sense of the ecosystem but the laws of nature - of course trump all else. And we're losing to nature - we don't quite know how to get what we want from it without severe negative consequences, and of course it kills each and every one of us from aging, because of missing software patches humans lack that other mammalian species have. (we're missing the non-aging of naked mole rats, the ability to regenerate of numerous species, and the resistance to develop cancer of elephants)
> My position is simple: no one, however brilliant, however well-meaning, however right about the robots, has the right to decide for me how my one life goes. Nor should he have the right to decide on your behalf. Even if you agree with him. *You* should make that call.
> The frame you're arguing from can't see that objection, because it isn't a number. It won't get captured by an expected value calculation, so it gets treated as zero.
Being alive at all is required to 'decide how my life goes'. I would prefer to delegate sovereignty to someone who has even the slimmest of a chance of ensuring that my life (and those of all my friends and loved ones) continues for as long as possible. This is the accelerationist argument.
EVQALY (expected value quality adjusted life years) is that number, it's nonzero.
This is why we have to rip up a whole bunch of existing structures, to clear trenches and tunnels right through 1000s of peoples lands, tear up union agreements at ports and replace all the dockworkers with faster robots, and so on - to power and supply the machine that has the authority over nature we don't. And every week of delay kills the number of people who die of disease that week and empowers the enemies of our sovereign.
Of course not one machine, but thousands of instances of of a few variants of the machine. And the real hard power will rest not in the hands of a billionaire, or directly in the hands of someone with a gun, but essentially the thousands of technicians and IT operators who can assign permissions who control access to the AIs and their weapons.
And we won't be supplicants to the machine, but will tens of thousands of PhD level biomedical scientists, nanotechnology experts, robots experts, various forms of computer engineer will be the ones commanding the machines, prompt by prompt and review by review, to our will.
But all of those people ultimately answer to the sovereign, just like you do as an officer of the court.
And that's the other element of all this - frankly I see this as a battle between the USA and China for the future. They are the only 2 powers with the vast resources needed to be relevant in AI and the legal structure to even compete. The EU, unfortunately, is not just fragmented, it has governance structures that make the battle lost before it started.
It's not merely the EU itself, but for example Germany has it's constitution deliberately broken, preventing federalism, so that nothing can be accomplished and nothing can be agreed on. Further progress cannot happen in Germany because years of delays are baked in.
So that's ultimately the problem I see - one frivolous NEPA lawsuit at a time, the USA essentially surrenders to China.
This post is simply amazing. I have been using the grand inquisitor to explain why organized religions are the way they are but never thought how it could apply to society as a whole. Truly thought provoking and eye opening. Will share broadly and continue to think about this for some time. As art is wont to do...
Thanks, Alon. The Grand Inquisitor is an interesting chapter in the Brothers K. When I first read it at 17, I found it a let down after the previous chapter, "Rebellion." I still love Rebellion, but the depth and profundity of the Grand Inquisitor grew more evident with time. What a work.
I think Lord Sananda expected the Spanish Inquisition. He understood how humans think and behave and what motivates them. He definitely wouldn’t have been surprised by it.
Wow, I have a lump in my throat.
Awesome.
“The machine works only on the willing.” I am not willing, and I keep turning off the machine like blowing out a trick birthday candle.
Your writing is so incisive, Owen. Thank you for this dose of clarity, signed, fellow flawed human.
“I keep turning off the machine like blowing out a trick birthday candle”—I love that locution! The machine has a way of reasserting itself indefatigably, doesn’t it?
I think your argument has tremendous status quo bias.
What I feel you're actually saying here is that the ideas of humans
(a) spending a significant fraction of their lifespan just learning
(b) democracy practiced the way some dudes in 1787 'wrote the source code' for it
(c) having freedom to decide what they consume instead of some algorithm selecting it for them
(d) basic products like 'bread', I assume you mean all essential goods, requiring effort to make instead of production by robots
Is a status quo that should be preserved and not torn down overnight like what appears to be scheduled. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/china-america-tariffs-trump-economy/683895/
I think it's incredibly important to understand one critical element.
You've probably seen the quote :
"every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
Nature doesn't say anything about humans, or their machines, being limited to this 'mote of dust'. We need one crucial technology - robots able to manufacture the parts used in more of themselves - and this allows exponential growth.
1. This means in real terms it is possible to have 100x, 1000x, or almost arbitrary numbers of zeros more everything. More manufactured goods, more tools, more housing, more lifespan, more partners, more weapons.
You I think are stuck on the idea that if you automate baking all the bread you create a society where no one can afford to eat, when the underlying limits of NATURE mean actually you just need to tax the tiniest percent of it* - either by government policy or by humans finding new jobs as influencers or something on the margin - for everyone to satisfy their needs.
2. You can disagree that (1) is a good way forward. But the entire edifice - having a sovereign, a US or EU government - requires competitive levels of military force. All the hard power comes from having enough guns, the only reason we can have this conversation is the sovereign protects us through deterrence. To compete in a world where at least one nation is building exponential numbers of robots and exponentially increasing their wealth requires you do the same.
3. And this is where I think we stop leaving parables of an idea like Jesus existing in the 1500s and get to concrete terms. "Every gridlock, every veto, every maddening procedural delay exists because the founders understood that the alternative—consolidated authority, however wise, however benevolent—is the Inquisitor’s chair."
Simply put - this transformation to a 100x or 1000x larger economy - physically looks like covering a large fraction of the lands of the United States, additional nations who will need to sign deals, by carrot or stick, because they physically occupy land in critical places (example : Chile enjoys the Atacama desert and along it's coast is cold ocean. This is where nature wants the largest scale data centers installed, enough for a terrawatt+ of continuous electric power) with equipment.
The rocket launches required to send humans to space in large numbers, or for robots to colonize the Moon, require a huge exclusion zone and essentially continuous launches.
What has to happen politically is for all of those veto points to be abolished. AI models tell me that federalism means the US federal government can itself issue permits, and it has already done so for natural gas pipelines - its why they can exist at all. FERC can bypass all of the veto points, and their enabling legislation CAN be amended to ban the injunction. (meaning that judges cannot issue an injunction, only award monetary damages later)
Near future industry, to support the robots, will need vast solar farms, new UHVDC tranmission lines, even larger sets of data centers likely on the seabed of the pacific ocean off the west coast, and likely a transit system of some kind of high speed automated conveyance, while the highways would be completely full of robot trucks. (overhead monorails, underground vacuum tunnels, probably both)
4. As an attorney you're probably not in favor of point 3. And that's fair. But I want to point out the obvious - China runs on a model where their central authority already is able to do exactly what we do with FERC, but for everything. This is why China has 2/3 of the world's high speed rail, the largest electric power production, and so on. This gives them an enormous structural advantage in the near future.
"So what" you say. "The US military is still the most powerful, and has nukes. We're safe and can take our time". This is unfortunately not the case - war is a game of budget and technology, and every weapon has a counter*. The USA or 'free world' only remains free as long as it can financially afford to keep up with the arms race, and an adversary with 100x the resources is not possible to defend against.
*succinctly, ronald reagans vision of 'safety' against nuclear attack is a matter of scale, scale the USA could not afford in the 1980s.
5. Worth pointing out : if you can increase the size of the economy by 100x, you only need 1% of current tasks to be things only humans can do, whether it's because it requires being a human to do the task, only a human can hold the license, or only a human can express the intent required for an AI to actually do the work. I suspect the balance does work as long as it's any percent at all, but acknowledge it can cause enormous disruption.
Hey man, thank you for this. Truly.
I think we're talking past each other, and not because we disagree about facts.
You've read the piece as a parable, a literary costume thrown over an economic argument. It isn't. The Grand Inquisitor isn't my metaphor. He's Dostoevsky's. In The Brothers Karamazov the Inquisitor isn't a villain, he's the believer. He takes your side, and he does it out of love: people can't bear the weight of their own freedom, so someone who loves them takes it off their backs and hands them bread and order in its place. He's right about almost everything. That's what makes him dangerous. Dostoevsky doesn't answer him with a better argument. Christ kisses him and walks out, and that refusal to acknowledge that the Inquisitor has any right to settle the issue is the whole damn thing.
That's what I think your comment misses. You've answered me as though I asked whether there would be enough, and you said, "Yeah." A hundred times, a thousand times more of everything, tax the tiniest percent, every need met. I grant you the math.
But I never asked whether there would be enough. I asked who decides.
Every line of your reply gives the same answer: someone other than me. The people building the machine. The ones who can see from above that the veto points are waste and the injunction should be banned and the friction should go, for my own good and the good of everyone like me.
You're making a calculation. I'm denying that anyone gets to make the calculation for me. I don't think that's status quo bias so much as a fundamentally different frame for understanding what's at issue. The system we have is an imperfect instrument for what I actually care about. I'll be the first to say it needs fixing. The thing I really care about is sovereignty. Mine, yours, anyone's. My position is simple: no one, however brilliant, however well-meaning, however right about the robots, has the right to decide for me how my one life goes. Nor should he have the right to decide on your behalf. Even if you agree with him. *You* should make that call.
The frame you're arguing from can't see that objection, because it isn't a number. It won't get captured by an expected value calculation, so it gets treated as zero. A worldview that prices human sovereignty at zero because it can't put a figure on it is what the essay is about.
Thing is, you're making the Inquisitor's argument. You offer the bread, then the authority, with the Inquisitor's care and his certainty that the rest of us aren't up to the task. He was heartbroken about it too. It didn't make him right. I'd rather do this badly myself than have it done well for me by someone who needs me quiescent, full, and entertained. I cannot abide a philosophy that relegates individual sovereignty to an afterthought.
> I asked who decides. Every line of your reply gives the same answer: someone other > than me. The people building the machine. The ones who can see from above that >the veto points are waste and the injunction should be banned and the friction should > go, for my own good and the good of everyone like me.
Specifically I believe the priority order is nature, federal sovereign, state sovereign, local sovereign, individuals.
Nature - not the sense of the ecosystem but the laws of nature - of course trump all else. And we're losing to nature - we don't quite know how to get what we want from it without severe negative consequences, and of course it kills each and every one of us from aging, because of missing software patches humans lack that other mammalian species have. (we're missing the non-aging of naked mole rats, the ability to regenerate of numerous species, and the resistance to develop cancer of elephants)
> My position is simple: no one, however brilliant, however well-meaning, however right about the robots, has the right to decide for me how my one life goes. Nor should he have the right to decide on your behalf. Even if you agree with him. *You* should make that call.
> The frame you're arguing from can't see that objection, because it isn't a number. It won't get captured by an expected value calculation, so it gets treated as zero.
Being alive at all is required to 'decide how my life goes'. I would prefer to delegate sovereignty to someone who has even the slimmest of a chance of ensuring that my life (and those of all my friends and loved ones) continues for as long as possible. This is the accelerationist argument.
EVQALY (expected value quality adjusted life years) is that number, it's nonzero.
This is why we have to rip up a whole bunch of existing structures, to clear trenches and tunnels right through 1000s of peoples lands, tear up union agreements at ports and replace all the dockworkers with faster robots, and so on - to power and supply the machine that has the authority over nature we don't. And every week of delay kills the number of people who die of disease that week and empowers the enemies of our sovereign.
Of course not one machine, but thousands of instances of of a few variants of the machine. And the real hard power will rest not in the hands of a billionaire, or directly in the hands of someone with a gun, but essentially the thousands of technicians and IT operators who can assign permissions who control access to the AIs and their weapons.
And we won't be supplicants to the machine, but will tens of thousands of PhD level biomedical scientists, nanotechnology experts, robots experts, various forms of computer engineer will be the ones commanding the machines, prompt by prompt and review by review, to our will.
But all of those people ultimately answer to the sovereign, just like you do as an officer of the court.
And that's the other element of all this - frankly I see this as a battle between the USA and China for the future. They are the only 2 powers with the vast resources needed to be relevant in AI and the legal structure to even compete. The EU, unfortunately, is not just fragmented, it has governance structures that make the battle lost before it started.
It's not merely the EU itself, but for example Germany has it's constitution deliberately broken, preventing federalism, so that nothing can be accomplished and nothing can be agreed on. Further progress cannot happen in Germany because years of delays are baked in.
So that's ultimately the problem I see - one frivolous NEPA lawsuit at a time, the USA essentially surrenders to China.
Beautiful.
This post is simply amazing. I have been using the grand inquisitor to explain why organized religions are the way they are but never thought how it could apply to society as a whole. Truly thought provoking and eye opening. Will share broadly and continue to think about this for some time. As art is wont to do...
Thanks, Alon. The Grand Inquisitor is an interesting chapter in the Brothers K. When I first read it at 17, I found it a let down after the previous chapter, "Rebellion." I still love Rebellion, but the depth and profundity of the Grand Inquisitor grew more evident with time. What a work.
Thank you for sharing this. Much appreciated!
I think Lord Sananda expected the Spanish Inquisition. He understood how humans think and behave and what motivates them. He definitely wouldn’t have been surprised by it.