Samuel Hammond is here.

He is a senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation.

He writes a substack called Second Best Ware a while back.

He published a series of illuminating and provocative essays on

AI and Leviathan. Sam touches on an incredible range of topics in these articles, as he does

in all his work. Today, though, we'll be focusing largely on his deep thoughts about whether government institutions

can cope with the coming technological disruption of AI. The answer might well be no. We might

be headed toward techno-futalism or techno-anarchism. And it might be awesome.

This is the tech policy podcast.

I'm Corbyn Barthold.

Sam, welcome.

Thank you for having me.

So I do want to focus on AI and state capacity.

But to understand that state capacity problem, we need to start with how fast the AI is likely

to take off because that's what's going to create the problem.

You have a great timeline in this series of essays where you game out your prediction of where things

are liable to head. Could you help our listeners wrap their heads around just how quickly

you think artificial intelligence is going to advance over the next decade plus?

Yeah, I mean, stepping back, what is the human brain, right? This is a topic of epic

controversy. Does it matter that we're made of meat and carbon? Well, on some dimension,

but what the brain does is primarily digital, right? Synapses firing and wiring.

And there's a remarkable parallel between our digital neural networks,

...