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Video and transcript of talk on "Can goodness compete?" - Joe Carlsmith

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(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.) Thank you. Okay. Hi. Thanks for coming. 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 example, locust-like value systems that only care about growing and consuming resources as fast as possible. So that’s what I’m going to say is the hardest problem. But there’s a bunch of other versions of the pro

Video and transcript of talk on "Can goodness compete?" - Joe Carlsmith Video and transcript of talk on “Can goodness compete?” Contents hide Introduction Aims for this talk Basic vibe Lineage of concern What I mean by goodness What I mean by competition Can *humans* compete? Some distinctions Alignment taxes More fundamental variants Negative sum dynamics The strategy stealing assumption Locust-like value systems Other ways the strategy stealing assumption might fail Addressing failures of the strategy stealing assumption Is preventing/constraining competition in this way even possible? Is pr

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