Episode 11: Samuel Hammond

This week, Daniel⁠ chats about technology, governance and culture with Samuel Hammond, senior economist for the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank focused on bridging the cultures of Silicon Valley and DC. Additionally, Sam has an outstanding substack where he writes about topics surrounding AI development & regulation, as well as the history and future of liberalism, secularism and pluralism.

Topics include:

• The day-to-day of working in a think tank

• What it means to bridge the cultural divide between Silicon Valley and DC

• The real American power centers (New York (finance/media), Texas (energy), Silicon Valley (tech) and how Hollywood has always been subservient

• What it means to embrace pluralism in terms of values, morals and ontological frameworks, and the benefits of such beliefs

• How to apply the theory of The Second Best to ones general worldview: “when it is infeasible to remove a particular market distortion, introducing one or more additional market distortions may lead to a more efficient outcome”

• The evolution of liberalism has evolved as a response to periods of extreme conflict (The 30 Years War, for instance)

• Debating whether or not crisis is essential for generating new equilibria in society

• Accelerationism and capitalism as a general intelligence

• Path dependency and historical development

• Exploring scenarios about what happens if AI scaling laws breakdown

• Predictions about AI’s impact on regime change and the rise of AI-native institutions

• Can open source AI keep up? Why it’s important that they keep trying, despite the widening performance gap

• Why Sam isn’t worried about children adapting to technological change

• The coming return of Neo-Medieval societal structures

• Completing the system of Canadian Idealism

Artwork: Edward Hicks, “Peaceable Kingdom”, 1844-1846