In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins tackle one of the most provocative questions in the age of AI: Does artificial intelligence finally make communism feasible?
They explore the structural failures of historical communism (incentives, power consolidation, information problems, and catastrophic mismanagement), why small-scale communism works (families, kibbutzim) but large-scale versions collapse, and whether AI-driven post-scarcity could solve these issues or simply replicate the same human problems of bad actors, bureaucracy, and distorted incentives.
Topics include:
The Sam Altman UBI study and why unconditional cash transfers often fail
Why Soviet science succeeded in some areas but governance always failed
Power vacuums in anarcho-communism vs. centralized systems
The future of “techno-fiefdoms,” AI-managed communities, and human reserves for those left behind by AI disruption
Demographic collapse and the likely rise of religious/techno-puritan movements
A raw, nuanced debate that challenges both right-wing and left-wing assumptions about economics, human nature, and the coming AI era.
Show Notes
Why Implementations Fail
Economic calculation problem (Ludwig von Mises, 1920):
Without private property and market prices, planners lack information on relative scarcity/costs.
You can’t rationally allocate steel, labor, or grain.
Attempts at “material balances” or cybernetic planning (e.g., Soviet OGAS—an attempted nationwide information network) failed repeatedly.
HOW AI CAN FIX THIS
Adequately and dynamically track supply and demand
Incentive and knowledge problems (Hayek):
People respond to incentives.
Common ownership dilutes responsibility (”tragedy of the commons”).
Local knowledge is dispersed; central decrees can’t match it.
AI can just more adequately monitor dispersed local knowledge
Innovation and maintenance collapse without profit/loss signals.
If AI becomes like a mother and just “handles” everything, then it’s not an issue
Power dynamics:
Enforcing abolition of private property and markets requires massive coercion.
With AI, we’re approaching a place where the majority of the population won’t have anything (or anything to lose), property-wise.
This concentrates power in a vanguard/party, which becomes a new ruling class (see Milovan Djilas’ The New Class).
We might see a bifurcated society: One ruling elite doing their own thing, then AI-led/governed communist societies for everyone else
The state doesn’t wither; it entrenches (Orwell, Animal Farm).
This is more of an issue when the state is fighting over something desirable, but what we’re looking at is a society largely abandoned by the elite.
Human nature (loaded with self-interest, status-seeking, family preferences as it is) doesn’t vanish.
Not a problem if a non-biological mind is governing.
Repeated patterns:
Initial revolutionary fervor lead to…
purges of “wreckers”/kulaks, which lead to
Shortages, which lead to…
blame external enemies/capitalism, which lead to…
more controls, which lead to…
corruption/black markets, which lead to…
reform or collapse
This is not bad luck or “revisionism”; it’s structural.
Even small-scale communes (e.g., 19th-century utopian ones, Israeli kibbutzim long-term, or modern intentional communities) often dissolve due to free-riding, exit of talent, and disputes over “needs.”
HOWEVER, with AI, I imagine communism to not come as a revolution, but rather a deus ex machina saving the leftovers in society from death.
Why has “real communism never been tried?”
“Real communism has never been tried” is a rhetorical defense that shifts the definition of communism away from every historical implementation. It functions as a motte-and-bailey tactic or “no true Scotsman” fallacy: the ideal (a stateless, classless, moneyless society of perfect equality and abundance) is defended, while real-world attempts are dismissed as insufficiently pure.
Defenders counter with “not real” because:
Stalin/Mao “betrayed” the revolution.
No stateless end-stage achieved.
External sanctions/wars interfered.
“State capitalism” or “deformed socialism.”
What “real communism” means in theory
Marx and Engels described:
Socialism as the transitional stage: proletarian dictatorship, state ownership of production.
Communism as the higher stage: state “withers away,” common ownership, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” no classes, no money, no scarcity.
Lenin, Trotsky, and later Marxists added layers like vanguard parties and democratic centralism to get there.
Every major attempt followed Marxist blueprints:
USSR (1917-1991): Bolshevik Revolution, War Communism, collectivization, Five-Year Plans. Result: Holodomor famine (millions dead), Gulags, purges, stagnation, collapse. Leaders admitted severe deviations but blamed “capitalist encirclement” or “bureaucracy.”
China (1949-): Great Leap Forward (30+ million dead from famine), Cultural Revolution, mass starvation and chaos. Shifted to market reforms under Deng for survival; current system is state capitalism with CCP control.
Cambodia (Khmer Rouge, 1975-79): Explicitly tried Year Zero agrarian communism. ~1.5-2 million dead (25% of population) via execution, starvation, overwork.
Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Venezuela: Similar patterns—initial redistribution, central planning, suppression of markets/dissent, economic decline, emigration, authoritarianism. Venezuela went from richest Latin American country per capita to hyperinflation and collapse under “21st-century socialism.”
The Black Book of Communism estimates 80-100 million deaths from democide, famine, and repression across implementations. These weren’t fringe experiments; they were the largest-scale attempts, backed by ideology from Marx’s writings.
Episode Transcript
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today we are gonna be discussing an exciting topic, which is does communism make sense now? Specifically what we’re gonna be digging into here is, like, we are known as, I guess, far right-wing YouTubers or podcasters or intellectual influencers.
I don’t know, right? No. But, but people consider us far right-wing. Now, a lot of our fans consider us very centrist, so maybe, but I, I identify as, as right wing, so whatever, right? Like, I... The, the, the sane far right is where I think I’d put us, right? A- at least within, like, the tech right circles and stuff like that.
Which puts us in an interesting position vis-à-vis communism, ‘cause I’m not gonna come out here and just be like... We have said it in the past on the show very clearly that communism may work in a post-scarcity economy. And we have also a number of times gone into what it means when we say something like that, right?
Mm-hmm. Where, like, we are putting [00:01:00] extremely heavy caveats on this. When people have done UBI experiments and they have just handed people money, they have seen extremely bad outcomes. The most famous is the Sam Altman one where they gave people $1,000 every month for three years, and the people who had been given the money they, they had less money at the end of it, total money, than the people who had been given nothing in terms of, like, wealth increase, right?
They, they didn’t spend any more time with their kids. They didn’t have any more kids. They didn’t spend any more time in education. They really only spent more time in recreation. That’s it.
Simone Collins: And they paid down their debt a little, so that’s nice.
Malcolm Collins: Hmm. That doesn’t really mean anything. Oh, they
Simone Collins: visited the doctor a little more.
Malcolm Collins: It doesn’t really mean anything if on net they had less money.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So
Malcolm Collins: yes, they paid down their debt, but on net they had less money. Right. So, just a disaster, and we’ve seen this in communities that are offered UBI, right? Like Native American communities, for example, where we see them just completely [00:02:00] dissolve in terms of productivity, in terms of drug addiction, in terms of alcohol addiction the moment they get on something that is the equivalent of, like, UBI or, like, local communism or something like that.
And so then the question is okay, How do we eh, th- that, that all being the case, like also clearly AI is gonna disrupt what the economy means, right? And, and, and it may not happen this generation, right? It may not happen, ... Well, it’s probably gonna happen in our lifetimes, if I’m gonna be honest.
Like, if we look at- Yeah ... the speed of AI in relation to automated workers e- even, even for physical labor from what we’re sort of seeing behind the scenes, that’s developing a lot faster than people realize. And that we may be replacing people in a lot more fields a lot faster than people think.
And so then the question is, is okay, well if that happens, then what does the economy mean? How do you have a [00:03:00] functional economy with struggle and some form of scarcity so people don’t go crazy without what we’ve come to understand as, like, market labor, right? And so to explore this subject, I want to focus on a few areas.
I want to focus on, like, underlying how does capitalism help people? Examine the individual structures within capitalism that lead to the net outcome of positive human results. And see how those can be potentially mimicked in a post traditionally capitalist economy.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: But then secondarily the big question we have is Okay, how does communism often fail, and how could AI, or even could AI realistically prevent these failure scenarios?
Simone Collins: Mm.
Malcolm Collins: So, classic failure scenario in communism that I’ll sort of walk people through why, why communism almost always [00:04:00] fails. Not almost always. It, it literally always fails above certain sizes. Communism works in small government stuff, like it works with some of the kibbutzim. It works with families.
Every family is communist. W- w- sorry, people don’t understand what I mean by that. Like it’s from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs, right? Like my baby doesn’t work, right? And I can’t produce milk for them, right? You know, the person who can produce milk produces the milk.
The, the, the, the baby and the kids are not expected to bring in an income at this stage, right? You know, we, but we, we still support them. The types of jobs and roles that each of us take on are the types of jobs and role that we’re best at, both due to our educational background, proficiencies, and yes, gender.
So we live in a communist structure already. We live in a communist utopia already, it’s just a very small one. But the question is, is why does it break down at a societal level? We’ve written extensively on this, so I’ll keep it pretty short. The key reason is [00:05:00] is when you are creating a larger communist structure, you need to centralize power in a way that rewards bad actors.
And a lot of people don’t s- s- they’re like, “Oh, it’s that people aren’t motivated when they just get money from the state,” or something like that. Or that you can’t do advanced things in a communist system, and that’s not true. Like, that, that’s actually, like, factually untrue. Like, the one thing the Soviet Union was actually pretty good at was science.
Like, they were beating us soundly in the space race for quite a long period of the space race. They had many excellent, excellent scientists. Yes, because of government bureaucracy and the way sort of power gets captured in communist systems, they also ended up making catastrophically stupid scientific blunders that killed hundreds of millions of people.
The Chinese did this as well. This is typically in fields like biology and, and stuff like this. But in, in physics, they [00:06:00] did pretty well. So no, it’s, it, it’s actually not that people are just unmotivated in these systems. Highly motivated, highly conscientious people are typically equally or, if not, even more motivated in communist ecosystems.
Where communist ecosystems really break down is for less competent fields. The, the average line worker and stuff like that. Because at this point, you don’t wanna do those jobs. Nobody wants to do those jobs. People often end up doing them at the point of a gun barrel and maliciously poorly. It’s, it’s the average desk worker job.
It’s not the, “I got my best job I could have ever gotten because I’m literally one of the best people in the country at doing said job.” Like, “I’m a gun nut, and now I get to spend all of my day coming up with gun designs, and now we have the AK-47.” Right? You know, “I’m a, a nuke nut.” Right? “I’m really interested in cutting edge nuclear technology, and now we have a, a Soviet atomic bomb.”
Right? By the way, like, to put in [00:07:00] context how impressive that is, Iran still can’t make an at- now a- admittedly, like, everyone’s mad at them, but, like, the, the Soviet Union was doing this stuff, like, over half a century ago, right, at this point. So Communism can actually motivate the very best to do the very best.
One of the problems you have with Soviet science, sorry if I’m getting on a sidetrack here but they, like, really screwed up their tank production, for example simply because of, like, government politics that ended up prioritizing one idiot’s designs over the guy who was actually more competent because Soviet systems are not always good at finding the most competent person.
Huh ... capitalist systems also struggle sometimes to find the most competent person, but generally- True
Simone Collins: story ...
Malcolm Collins: like, if the government turned me away in a capitalist system, I could presumably go and build my own company separately off of my ideas. It doesn’t work that way, especially not in a country like the United States.
Like, I go off [00:08:00] and I wanna build my own tank and because somebody else has, like, government crony contract, they, they still get the government crony contract because they’re at Boeing and they’ll, they’ll kill you or something. You know, that’s, that’s the way this works. But again, the, the, the point I’m making here is yes, Sovietism leads to catastrophic inefficiencies but you can get those within at least what we call capitalist ecosystems as well, right?
Mm-hmm. So now back to what the real problem of communism is So when you’re going down a communist path, you essentially have two strategies that you can attempt. You can say, “We’re gonna centralize all the power into one bureaucracy and this single bureaucracy is going to manage all forms of the economy and everything like that.”
And everybody knows, like, generally this doesn’t seem to really work for a number of reasons tied to, like, inefficiency, but we’ll put those reasons aside in a bucket for now. So strategy [00:09:00] number one, centralize everything. Essentially you’re creating a country that’s ruled by a single monopolistic company.
That is, that is functionally what, what that form of communism is. Which is why I always say that the end state of communism and the end state of extreme libertarianism are the same.
Simone Collins: Well, and I mean, a, a big part of this that tends to create huge, huge problems is when you are creating one, when you’re consolidating everything, you’re also abolishing private property and markets, and that requires- Well,
Malcolm Collins: and then people don’t have the, the same reason to invest in their continued property.
Simone Collins: And it requires a lot of coercion. Like, pe- people don’t just, “Oh, sure. Yeah, take my house. That’s fine. I didn’t...
Malcolm Collins: That’s fine.” I mean, that’s, that’s generally the lower bloodshed and the lower death toll is on the redistribution part, though. Yeah,
Simone Collins: that’s the step one part. But I’m just saying, like, as a little starting point, there’s also some friction there.
Yeah, I
Malcolm Collins: mean, obviously it involves robbing people of their property and everything like that. [00:10:00] I get that. But that’s- Y- yeah ... usually the lower death... I mean, a lot of, obviously conservative commentators are gonna crash out about government redistribution, everything like that. I’m just pointing out that’s not actually where the, the vast majority of communist death tolls come from.
The vast majority of communist death tolls come from the inefficient management that happens after that.
Simone Collins: Yeah, so in terms of, At least there’s this one book that tries to give a full tally. It’s called The Black Book of Communism, and they estimate that there have been 80 to 100 million deaths From democide, famine, and repression across implementations.
I think famine’s the biggest killer.
Malcolm Collins: Right. So let’s, we’ll, we’ll talk about... okay, I’ll quickly explain why the things happen without going too deep into them. I can. One problem you have within a communist ecosystem is that an individual has no reason to invest in anything that they own, because they don’t own anything.
Yeah. So like, eh, our house requires a ton of effort and work to keep from falling apart. This is why if you go to [00:11:00] many communist countries, you don’t see tons of old houses, or you see houses in horrible disrepair, or, like, giant blocks in horrible disrepair. Because people didn’t have a reason to invest in the upkeep of their own property and the area around their property, right?
Like, it’s not just my house I want to be nice, it’s the region around my house, because that increases its value. And this is true of companies, this is true of everything. It’s, it’s a huge positive cycle that you get out of this. Mm-hmm. And the, the secondary bigger thing is, is inefficiency in the way things are operated.
And what people say, and I think incorrectly, is that you simply cannot manage, in a planned out format, an entire economy. And it is in attempting to do that that the Soviet systems begin to break down and the communist systems begin to break down in ways that lead to these famines and stuff like that.
But when we look at the actual causes of most of the famines, it isn’t actually due to problems in inefficient management. It’s, [00:12:00] it’s due to explicitly bad policy like killing all the birds in China that were eating the pests on the crop. They were mad that they sometimes ate the crops, and then they had giant pests, and then a bunch of people died because the way that they were measuring food is they would go to a town and they’d basically tell the person running the town, “Well, if you can’t show me X amount of food, you’re gonna be removed from your position,” right?
So now they’re like, “Oh yeah, we’ve got that amount of food,” right? And then they go to the people and they go, “Hey, the military works for me. You give all your food for export.” Now they don’t have any food left, because they were just pretending that they had X amount of food. But they wanted to keep their position, and they had the guns, so they were in a position to do this.
Because if they don’t do this, then they’re put in a... Now this is all a problem of organization. Like, all of these individual problems could be solved if you had an intelligent and conscientious person going through the system and attempting to address every one of these problems. What we really need to get to is why that doesn’t happen, why these problems never get [00:13:00] cau- solved, why bad ideas get pushed down, and we need to say, “Can AI prevent this?”
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: So, thoughts before I go further, Simone?
Simone Collins: I mean, I, I think you’re focusing a lot on the pure governance problems, but there’s more to it than just that, and so it’s also important to address those other short, shortfalls.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. What... I’m, I’m actually claiming there are not, actually. The problems that are not governance problems are not that big in communism.
So what do you think they are?
Simone Collins: That we discount the extent to which markets are like an organism or ecosystem that, that is able to manage huge amounts of information in a very responsive, distributed, natural way. And that when you try to have a human-run mostly blind government system run it, you don’t get the data you need.
Like, planners don’t have enough information- So I- ... about relative stares- scarcity and cost of things ...
Malcolm Collins: fundamentally disagree with your thesis here. There are [00:14:00] ways within a communist system, without-
Simone Collins: yeah, and the Soviet, like, there’s the Soviet OGAS system that they, they tried to create this nationwide information network to, to better manage this, but they couldn’t.
Like, just getting the information inputs in a pre-AI age was just not feasible. And they had to plan-
Malcolm Collins: No, the point I’m making is it isn’t just unfeasible. They just did it in bad ways. You can create pseudo-capitalistic systems in a communist empire that can measure supply and demand and react to supply and demand with rewards.
I mean, you are creating essentially capitalism with extra steps. But the idea of having distributive information networks that can recognize scarcity and demand is not something that is out of completely impossible in a communist system. The point I’m making here is that if you actually look, and I know from, like, a [00:15:00] capitalist perspective, the great machine, and people have talked about, like, capitalism as the first AI, right?
And in a way, capitalism is kind of the first AI, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: But the, the capitalist machine or the AI that’s created by the giant capitalistic network is not something that it is completely impossible to reverse engineer. And the reason I say this is that when we look at the failures of communist systems demonstrably, they are not due to failures of centralized control.
They are due to specific policy failures
Simone Collins: I wouldn’t say it’s just policy failures, too. I think that the fundamental system whereby, again, in a pre-AI age, communism comes to exist, which is this process of like a revolution to socialism to then communism, is doomed [00:16:00] to fail, right? Because you have this revolutionary fur- fervor, and then you have the purge where like a bunch of like people lose their property, and there’s the kulaks.
Mm. And then you get shortages, and then you have the famine, and then you have the backlash to that, the blame. “We have to, we have to handle this. Oh, it’s, it’s capitalism. It’s all these other things.” And then that means we have to implement more controls, and then that leads to corrupt and black markets, and then that leads to reform or collapse.
And it’s just, like things... It’s, it’s an inherently unstable system the way you have to stumble into cap- or to communism now. And here’s my fundamental thesis when it comes to communism and AI and how it’s going to play out and why it’s going to work, and why many of the fundamental things that lead to this instability aren’t going to be a problem.
One of the key things being, I mean, I know you’re talking about like human-led governance being really stupid, and AGI can sort of in a hand-wavy way fix [00:17:00] that, and the right AGI can. I think the other thing is that communism is often a problem because a bunch of corrupt, power-hungry people are like scrambling for the governing power and for the resources of like the workers and all their possessions, right?
Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.
Simone Collins: But what, what happens when you have a bunch of people who don’t work and don’t own anything? Like no one’s gonna fight over them. No one wants them. And what I think might happen is that a large- a largely orphaned population, the l- the bottom part of the K-shaped economy, is going to be left high and dry by governments that falter, both due to like weird AI disruption, but also due to demographic collapse, and then also just left behind by the rich people who go off to their like techno-futurism.
That’s an interesting
Malcolm Collins: thesis, but I’m gonna push back on this.
Simone Collins: Let me finish with my thing then, and then you’ll push back. And then basically I think that some, some of the people who feel bad morally about leaving [00:18:00] behind everyone else are gonna send down some of their AGI gods to just create little communist communities for the people who’ve been left behind, and then those people will be taken care of by mother AI that will handle all their stuff for them.
So you don’t have anyone having their property taken away. You don’t have anyone, you know, being like accused of corruption or anything. You basically just have AI taking care of those who are left behind. Why is this wrong?
Malcolm Collins: So, I, I will get to that in a second. You might get that. Like, that is a possible good scenario.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: But the reason why I think that’s wrong is because I fundamentally disagree with you about the first part. The first part is, is communism, and I, I, I keep trying to come back to this because it’s actually central to understand why AI will likely fail even within a communist system, right? Like, why- AI would break communism is that communism doesn’t fail because [00:19:00] of it, it, it prevents competent people from working, or it doesn’t motivate people enough, or it’s bad at determining on-the-ground risks because capitalism just works as this brilliant machine that can measure things about economic states that communism could never measure.
And the evidence I used for that is, again, the failures and the successes we had under communism. Communism achieved some things that were enormously successful in terms of scientific progress, industrial development, et cetera. But it also obviously super high des- I’m not ... But what I’m saying is it’s to just be like communism didn’t function at all is, is factually incorrect.
And to say that within a communist ecosystem like let’s look at a capitalist ecosystem, right? If you go to a factory what type of person do you want running the factory, right? The type of person you want running the factory is gonna be the most competent person to run the factory, who has the support of the, the workers and can push them to work [00:20:00] their hardest.
In a communist system, what type of person do you want to run the factory? It, it’s the same type of person, right? The people who end up in the lower level management positions in communist and capitalist systems at least aspirationally in how these systems could, should be structured, are the same types of people.
Like you don’t have this, ... A- and it’s also communist systems don’t send food to the wrong place you know, malevolently or something like that. When we talk about communist systems failing at determining what, like where economic needs need to go, right? The, in the, in the way a capitalist system would.
The biggest failures are virtually never because the, the system wasn’t good at monitoring things. They are again, when I was talking about like the, the wheat famine, right? It was, it was a twofold failure. It was a failure of the, the [00:21:00] way that they were measuring, like how much wheat each region had, was a very bad way to be measuring each, how much wheat each region had, that led to adverse incentives, which led to them sending wheat to locations that didn’t need wheat from locations that did need wheat.
A- and they created a pest problem because they couldn’t tell people above them that they were wrong, right? Now note, in a capitalist system, you might not be able to tell your boss that they’re wrong, right? Like it let’s consider Ubisoft or something like that. I might- Mm-hmm ... even in a capitalist system not be able to tell my boss you make a, a, a video game about a, a Black guy in Japan going around murdering people.
It’s probably gonna cause problems, and a lot of people are going to be very upset by that.” And then I get fired, right? But within a capitalist system, the wider capitalist ecosystem actually punishes that person, not because of an issue of supply and demand. In a communist system, you’d presumably want to punish the person as well, [00:22:00] if the goal of the company was entertainment and not spreading the ideology.
But in a communist system, it’s often spreading ideology, so they, they probably wouldn’t be punished in the same way. But you, you understand what I mean. Like, suppose it’s something other than a game company and I’m actually like, “Oh, the way you’re doing this is functionally bad and going to lead to a bad product.”
Communist ecosystems should be determining, oh, this is a bad product. And there’s functionally ways that they can determine, oh, this is a product that people don’t like. Mm ... but so now the question is, is why do these systems fail in communism, right? Like, why do the people in the positions that would be equivalent to, like, running Ubisoft in a communist system not end up getting replaced or not end up getting replaced in the way that they should get replaced?
And it’s because, going back to what I was saying originally, communist systems fall into two broad categories. One is they function like a giant monopoly. Like, the entire government is one giant ultra libertarian monopoly where one company town has taken over everything and houses everyone and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah ... very dystopian, whatever. But the thing is, is the moment I say that, [00:23:00] every communist is gonna say “Well, that’s not the way I wanna do communism.” You know, they wanna go in and do- Yeah ... anarcho-communism. They wanna do syndicalism. They wanna do basically they wanna have independently operating small communist groups.
Which extremely doesn’t work. The reason it doesn’t work is because it leaves a power vacuum. This is also why, like, extreme forms of libertarianism don’t work and everything like that. So suppose I try to set up this anarcho-communist system or even a completely syndicalist system, right, where, like, everything is, is totally decentralized.
Anybody who decides to act as a bad actor and begin to aggressively and subversively acquiring both support and resources can exert power on anyone who’s playing by the rules. And this is, like, a pro- like, in the Molyneux debate when I was trying to figure out how he thought that his weird libertarian utopia would work this is something that, like, he seemed to [00:24:00] fundamentally not understand.
He’s like, “No, everyone will rise up against a bad actor as soon as a bad actor starts accumulating power.” And I’m like, “I’m sorry, like, we have history to look at. We know that doesn’t happen,” right? Like, bad actors are actually very good at accumulating power. And and then they, they build an army, and the army can go to the person next to them.
This is true even outside of, even without a military, right? So this, this came when I was talking, like, extreme forms of libertarianism with Steven Molyneux. I was like, how do you get something like a chip fab, right? That costs- Yeah ... hundreds of billions of dollars to make?
Simone Collins: Yeah. Like- Years of a- ... well-
investment with no payout, et cetera.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The, the... and there might be no payout. And he’s like, “Well, I guess we could get, like, hundreds of millions of workers to form, like, a cooperative to invest everything into this.” And then it’s like, okay, then who’s operating the cooperative, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And they’re like, “Well, then we would have, like, some form of [00:25:00] democracy.”
And I’m like, okay, so as soon as somebody gains power within this giant fabricator state, right? That’s basically, it’s a state created to run a fabricator. Why would they not attempt to create systems that prevent them from being removed from power? Yeah. And the answer is, of course, well, everyone would rise up against them if they did something like this.
In the same way that he was like, well, he’s like, “Even if they got away with it, even if they accomplish all of this, then people wouldn’t buy their product because they’d see that they’re a bad actor.” Yeah. And I’m like, bro, you have a product in your pocket that was probably made by slaves. Like, you know that’s not true.
You know that people-
Simone Collins: Or eating food that is, or what, any, any mixture of things. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So what ends up happening, because the, the, the wider point I’m making here, here, here is customers don’t really punish bad actors. You, as a watcher of this show, likely barely punish bad actors. Even, even when [00:26:00] you’re...
I mean, maybe video games have finally gotten punished because they screwed over gamers for so long. But in the vast majority of cases bad actors don’t actually end up getting pub- punished that much by public sentiment. You know, even, even when they do something completely insane, it’s like their stock will fall like 5%.
It’s like, oh, no, you know. I mean, bad day to be the CEO ‘cause it’s like billions of dollars, but- You know, in, in the grand scheme of, like, society, it doesn’t matter. So the problem is with the anarchist and all of these power distributed systems is whenever somebody says, “I’m not gonna play by your distributed power rules, I’m just gonna accumulate all the power for myself,” they end up growing in influence.
And functionally, that’s what happens with most communist governments, is they start with a bunch of people saying like, “Let’s genuinely try to make this work.” Mm-hmm. And then some people begin to gain positions of power, and they’re like, “What if instead of genuinely trying to get this to work, I [00:27:00] use the apparatus of the state to consolidate power around me?”
Now, it’s very hard if you are a faction. So let’s suppose large communist country, two factions come to power with a legitimate government, right? Like, I’m not even talking about just, like, the warlords because you never even get to a stage where you have, like, pure autonomous regions for very long in these sort of libertarian communist fantasies because they immediately devolve.
People immediately consolidate power, I mean, within, like, a month of it entering any sort of state like that. But so I’ll function- focus on it on the way it actually typically happens. You have a bunch of often sometimes bleeding-hearted idiot leftists in a, in a room, haven’t really operated anything before, don’t really know what they’re doing, but may have positive intentions for the state.
And then you have the guy who comes in the room, your Stalin or whatever, right? Who’s like Uh-huh. Well, let’s try to be a bit more efficient [00:28:00] about this. I’m gonna talk with my friends in the military, and I tell them, “Hey, like, these guys aren’t really doing things the right way. And, you know, I think you, the heads of the military, deserve a bit higher standard of living than everyone else, don’t you think?
I mean, you’re controlling... You, you, you work so hard compared to everyone else.” And you begin to, instead of trying to distribute wealth and resources equally in the society, you begin to distribute wealth and resources in a way that maintains your power within the society, your power hierarchy within the society.
But
Simone Collins: you’re still, this is all with the supposition that this is humans running and everything and calling the shots.
Malcolm Collins: Right. I’m gonna get to the point. Okay. Because with AI, it’s the same problem, right? Which is... I’ll get to that in just a second, right?
Simone Collins: Okay, okay.
Malcolm Collins: But you need to understand why it fails with humans to understand why it would likely fail with AI.
So essentially, everyone who is [00:29:00] a bad actor, because they’re saying instead of taking all of the resources they can create and distributing them as much as they can, they take as resources they create, they distribute 20% and they take 80% to continue consolidating their position. So one, this leads to a ton of waste in the system in terms of the wealth that the people at the top are living, et cetera.
But two it leads to all the way down within the power hierarchy bad actors ending up in the highest level power positions, because it’s basically dictator to dictator to dictator to dictator all the way down, the people with, with those sorts of mindsets. And so you get this enormous corruption.
Because when I’m thinking about you know, do I wanna tell my boss that this planning has to kill all the birds is a dumb idea I’m not actually thinking about is this going to help my sub-state the most, right? Like if my region or the people or the farmers. I’m thinking about is this gonna help me consolidate power within [00:30:00] my position with the broader hierarchy, right?
The problem with AI is AI fundamentally doesn’t really change this. So, let’s assume that you create a truly post-scarcity sys- system which is essentially what Simone is positioning with her communist ecosystem. So what she’s essentially saying, and I don’t know if I, I, I don’t disagree with this point, that if you could create true super abundance the, the, the people who are either competent or corrupt enough to end up in the positions of power have so much wealth and abundance that the, the coins that fall off their plates feel like ultimate luxury to the people that they’re falling in, into the trough.
Well,
Simone Collins: it’s not, no. There’s additional motivation. Th- they, with AI, they could have the ability to create broadly from their perspective, autonomous AI-run communities that feed [00:31:00] and house people. Like a, a new version of fiefdom. You know how like the way that a lot of versions of fiefdom worked was you had the lord who lived on the state, and one of the reasons why in these grand houses you had all these ridiculous roles where they were like essentially job programs.
You know, the underbutler and the footman and the, the, the various types of cooks and, and all these people. It was a jobs program, and then everyone in the village, you know, they, they had somewhere to live, and then the, it was this whole little economy. They could c- create presumably a bunch of these little things that are all run by AI that give people little things to do and keep people busy and feed people food, and it’s not just, oh, the, you know, they’re, they’re eating like food runoff or something.
It’s that th- it’s better to have people be able to show up at these places and, and get placed, get a house, get a job, you know, a job have something to do in their life, you know, become some kind of artisan craftsman or something and live their little [00:32:00] picturesque covet life than to, you know, die in large droves and look, look bad and, and a lot of people just don’t- Well,
Malcolm Collins: no, right, but this is, this is the fundamental logical error that you’re making here.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: And it actually comes from growing up in the urban monoculture that you’re making this error. Okay. Which is very fun, because I think you’ll see it the moment I point it out.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: When you look at the quality of life of people who are relying on our today version of the types of systems that you’re talking about between states the amount of money that goes into these systems is often not just disco related, but inversely correlated with the actual quality of life of the people living off of the systems.
Simone Collins: I think they’re gonna... No. This, you’re seeing the very first version of UBI that people, thanks to the experimentation being done now, right? They’re learning from it. They’re going to discover-
Malcolm Collins: No, they’re not learning
Simone Collins: from it ... Come on. Okay, like in The Matrix, right? They’re like, “Oh, well, we made the first version of the matrix where everyone just had everything, [00:33:00] and it really didn’t work.
And so we created this new version where everyone has a job and they’re miserable, and it’s perfect.” And they’re gonna figure that out with UBI, and they’re gonna realize the best thing to
Malcolm Collins: do- We have already seen proof they won’t So I’ll ex- I’ll give you proofs that they won’t, right?
Simone Collins: Okay, what’s
Malcolm Collins: the one example?
Right now, when I’m talking more broadly, if you look at, like, California’s homeless, they often live much worse lives than homeless in other areas, despite all the money going into that. Yeah, it’s, it’s egregious. And you’re like, “Oh, they’re trying to fix it. They’re trying to fix it,” right? And I’m pointing out to you, why are...
Because you gotta ask yourself, why are the lives of California’s homeless so much worse than other states when so much more money is going to them? And it’s because of the inefficient bureaucracy following the same sorts of failings that we see in communist systems. And so now what you’re gonna come and say is you’re gonna say, like, “Well, these AI tech lords, they won’t fall for these same types of errors.”
And I’m like, “Hmm, Simone, in the UBI study that Sam Altman did, do you remember how the team that did the study [00:34:00] framed the results to Sam Altman? Did we already see an instance of them, in the very first instance where we could be moving down a good pathway, immediately lie about and manipulate the results to hide that it didn’t work in a way that-
Simone Collins: No, but Malcolm, those systems are going to collapse.
Like, I’m not saying this is gonna happen soon, but it’s going to happen-
Malcolm Collins: What do you mean? That’s the craziest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. How did, what do you mean they’re going to collapse? They can’t collapse. They’re AI tech moguls who presumably have near infinity money if you’re talking about in the future, right?
Like, you think because people are living bad lives in their communist, quote-unquote, “utopias” that they’re going to care? Right? Like, they, they don’t care. California, San Francisco doesn’t care about its homeless drug addicts who are walking, zonked out on the streets and sleep in the poo that’s all around the financial district, right?
Like, if you look at the quality of lives [00:35:00] of people who live next to super abundance today, the elites, like, your thesis is, oh, they will see their policies failing, and they will change their policies, when your lived reality is that the exact opposite is happening.
Simone Collins: Those aren’t their policies. They’re living within a legacy bureaucracy government system and society that they certainly wouldn’t design.
What I’m describing
Malcolm Collins: is- But Sam Altman’s study was his
Simone Collins: study ... from the ground up techno fiefdoms that will be created but like sort of nature reserves for p- for h- for the humans that get left
Malcolm Collins: behind. But, but Sam Altman’s study was his st- are you denying-
Simone Collins: It was, but what he was, what... So you have to look at the game that he is playing.
He needs to give people a narrative that makes them comfortable with what’s going on today. If you were to say to them, “Okay, well, step one, society completely collapses, millions of people die. Step two, we’re gonna create some, like, nature reserves where people will [00:36:00] live and have jobs instead of live these, like, isolated fantasy lives and, and, you know, going forward for, like, the, the people who are left behind.
Like, we’ll, we’ll give a good life to many of them. But we can’t do that until society collapses because we won’t have, like, the land rights and stuff, and we won’t be allowed to govern them. So, for now, because I don’t want you to, like, completely firebomb my house successfully this time, I’m going to tell you that I have done the research and I’m fully convinced that all I need to do is just give you a lot of money each month, and then you can just do whatever you want with it, and that will make you happy.”
And people are like, “Okay, good. Well, at least Sam Altman is eventually gonna make sure that I get $10,000 a month and it’s gonna be great, and I’m gonna get DoorDash everything and play video games for the rest of my life, and hopefully it’ll be fine.” Th- but- What, and
Malcolm Collins: I’m pointing
Simone Collins: out to you that we’ve already seen that-
he has no incentive to communicate anything other than UBI to people. C- can you imagine if Sam Altman came out and was like, “Okay, right. So we ran the experiment, we looked [00:37:00] at the data, and, you know, it looks like we actually shouldn’t give you money because it doesn’t actually make a difference”? That’s like, get a job, Al.
Speaker: don’t you get a job? If you’re so hungry, why don’t you get a job? Get a goddamn job, Al. You got a negative attitude.
That’s what’s stopping you. You gotta get your act together.
Simone Collins: No, what he could have done- No, he can’t do that ... and so
Malcolm Collins: there’s, there’s two worlds that we live in. One is the world that I positively live in, and the other is a world you posit we live in, okay? So in the world I posit we live in, Sam Altman doesn’t actually care about the fate of the vast majority of people.
He cares about promoting UBI like, it, this is what I assume, because it allows him to continue to consolidate power. Remember how I said bad actors don’t really care about the effects of what they’re doing, they only care about consolidating power? So in that world, he would do something like conduct a UBI study, then lie about the results to mollify people.
Now, [00:38:00] let’s assume world number two, Simone world. Simone world is Sam Altman conducts a study on UBI, but he really does want one day, Because you know what’s cheaper than giving everyone money? Autonomous drone swarms around your house, okay? But you think, okay, no, one day, a private islands, which, you know, he’ll have, right?
Yeah. But your plan is, no, no, no, no, no. We live in alternate world where he actually does want some sort of stable utopia for the, the, the masses, right? So if we live in this world, what would have happened is he would have conducted that study, and the results of the study would’ve said something like, “Oh Well, it turns out that a traditional, you know, sort of blanket UBI program doesn’t appear to be, d- doesn’t appear to work, so what we need to do is try some alternate type of UBI program.
Like, let’s try to innovate on this for a type of UBI that does work. That wouldn’t have freaked everyone out. That would have had most people looking at the results and being like, “Oh, this is interesting. You know, you’re [00:39:00] trying to find something. You found result number one.” Instead, you see the exact opposite, the immediate glazing over of any result or data point that doesn’t fit his stated agenda or proposed solution to the hellscape that he might be creating.
Simone Collins: Look, I just told you that I agree that he doesn’t have any incentive to tell the truth about his UBI experiment and that he- Well, he
Malcolm Collins: does. If, if his plan is... It’s only marginally harder for him to actually try to help people. It’s just that it’s completely irrelevant to him.
Simone Collins: I don’t think it is. So you can have someone who is incentivized to amass power, amass wealth, may do things even that skirt morality and law to do so, who still- feels genuine pain when presented with the plight of human suffering.
Exactly the point I’m making. Who would like to make it go [00:40:00] away. And once these people have the means to say, “Okay, AI assistant, please go build something where some of these people can live and make me feel better about this,” they will do it.
Malcolm Collins: Well, and the point I’m making is they can’t do it.
Simone Collins: Why can’t they?
Malcolm Collins: So if you look at, and, and this is the reason I was bringing up like social welfare programs in San Francisco and stuff like that. San Francisco is a city that is full of very intelligent tech workers who also vote.
Simone Collins: Yeah. But yeah, th- they’re stuck with the San Francisco residents who have all these NIMBY laws, and they’re stuck with all these policies.
I don’t think they believe in supporting- The bad policies- ... things like needle distribution and,
Malcolm Collins: you know. The bad policies that are implemented in San Francisco if, if you look at them, right, some of them come from the legacy residents. The vast majority come from the donors to the Democratic Party who [00:41:00] are tech moguls.
That’s where the money’s coming from that’s going into these political PACs. The problem is, is that when you go to said, let’s say, Democratic tech mogul, and I know this because I know these people from San Francisco, you know these people from San Francisco. You go to them and you say this policy of giving people fentanyl on the street, it’s making their lives harder.
This policy of putting homeless people in hotel is leading to externalities for residents,” and they’re just like, “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, it’ll work next year.” You’re acting like they, th- and, and these people care. They, quote-unquote, care about the suffering of the poor. But they don’t
Simone Collins: care- I just, I’ve yet to encounter anyone who works in the tech world in San Francisco who approves of homeless management policy in the area.
Malcolm Collins: They still vote Democrat.
Simone Collins: Ditto with LA. Well, yeah. But that’s, that, those are due to very complex, like, social brainwashing- Oh ... systems of the Bay Area.
Malcolm Collins: This, this is what I’m talking [00:42:00] about. When you get somebody like A- Sam Altman in this sort of a position in power, right? Like suppose he accumulates all this power.
He’s Sam Altman, god king of a region, and he’s distributing money to the masses in the region. Let’s suppose that the way he’s distributing money is leading to the same sorts of externalities that we see among, like, Portland or San Francisco homeless right now, right? Like massive drug problems, the problems we see in Native American communities, you know, massive crash outs, lots of problem.
Okay, suppose that those are all the functional result of what they’re doing, okay? What, what Sam Altman is doing, right? And then you have us online YouTube warriors or something like that trying to get to Sam Altman to tell him, “Hey, none of these policies you’re operating are actually working.” Right?
Do you think that we would be able to get in his ear, or are the people who are going to be getting in his ear the most the people who are operating the [00:43:00] failed policies, who recommended the failed policies, and who have a vested interest in him not fully grokking how much these policies are not working?
Even if you add AI to the chain and he does something like asks AI, you know, “Are my policies working or not working?” You know that, like, AI is gonna gas him on this, right? AI right now will gas you on Democratic policies. If you ask AI something like you know, “Is X or Y Democratic policy around, like, poor people actually effective?”
When you look at, like, AIs on political charts, you know it’s gonna support these policies that we know functionally don’t work. So why would it not still do that when he’s in god king position and now has three layers of bureaucrats around him that prevent him from fully grokking how much his plan is failing?
Simone Collins: I have doubts about that. I just I have severe doubts about that. You can [00:44:00] look at, for example, coverage of the mayoral race in Los Angeles in California and see the level to whi- i- to which people are really, really fed up with the homeless policy in California, with the housing policy in California. I think there’s that that demonstrates that people aren’t necessarily ideologically locked into the system that you’re describing.
Beyond that, it is parasitoidal, this, this kind of approach to governance, this culture as well. It will kill the host, and the host will die. Demographic collapse is such that these things aren’t going to be supported much longer anyway. They’re going to collapse on their own, and I don’t think AI, in the time over, the time period over which these systems are going to collapse, AI is not yet going to reach the place, in my opinion, where it will be able to sweep in and deus ex machina style, like fix [00:45:00] it.
So I really think that these systems are going to fully crumble which is not the happier scenario. I’m, I, like, I don’t want this to ha- it, it, it’s bad. But these systems won’t be left. I, I do think that, that many people... When, when a communist utopia will be created, I think it will be in sovereign city state style, essentially human reserves that are created for the people who were left behind but who survived.
Malcolm Collins: What you need to make AI communist, like, like post-scarcity worlds work and not lead to the same problems we have with like homelessness and stuff like that in Democrat counties and the poor in Democrat counties doing much worse is them being operated by an extremely austere and dedicated ca- caste that is ideologically aligned at the level of [00:46:00] like religious fervor.
So if you had like let’s say techno-puritans end up taking over and, and, and like really dedicated techno-puritans were running everything, it could work. If you had a state with AI and somebody like the Dalai Lama, like the last Dalai Lama and the top levels of like the Tibetan, you know, that, that I’d like...
Look, I don’t love everything he did. I thought he was a bit foolish on a number of issues. But that could probably work, right? Because you need to be able to cast off if, if you personally are not interested either because you were raised this way or you have an extremist ideological commitment in power accumulation or luxury or anything like that outside of, for the purpose of some wider objective function you have on reality, If, if you have that, then you can use AI to create post-scarcity.
But I think without that being a person’s fundamental driver above all other drivers, [00:47:00] you cannot get true post-scarcity even with AI in sort of like how it reaches the masses
Simone Collins: I guess time will tell.
Malcolm Collins: Yep. Well, we’re gonna see. And we can hear in the comments what people think. But basically my th- thought is the next society we’re gonna have to transition into post demographic collapse and everything like that is one of, of, y- you know, religious fanaticism essentially.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
I, I mean, we can agree on that. That’s, I think- That’s, that’s more about demographic collapse than it is about artificial intelligence or communism. It has more to do with just- Yeah ... who’s going to continue to have a desire and an interest in reproducing in, in the face of n- demographic collapse, AI, and massive disruption.
Malcolm Collins: So what’s the story with dinner tonight?
Simone Collins: I have one batch of the pork leftover, and then after [00:48:00] that, or we... So you can either have that tonight or tomorrow night. What I could also do is just tomato soup and grilled cheese or tomato soup and quesadillas tonight if you prefer. Oh
Malcolm Collins: my God, quesadillas.
Your quesadillas are so good.
Simone Collins: That’s ‘cause they have MSG in them. That’s what I’ve
Malcolm Collins: been asking for. Is the batch, do you have from
Simone Collins: batch
Malcolm Collins: one or batch two?
Simone Collins: Batch two
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I’ll wait on that. I’ll do quesadillas and tomato soup.
Simone Collins: Yeah, batch two might be more tender since it’s leaner meat after just sitting for a couple of days loosening up.
You know what I mean?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that makes sense.
Simone Collins: Theoretically.
Malcolm Collins: So I’m very excited. The, the, the... what she’s talking about is slow-cooked pork belly that she’s gotten very good at making.
Simone Collins: Aw, that’s sweet
Malcolm Collins: of you ... and I am very excited for my que- oh, quesadillas, tomato soup, and fancy fries.
Simone Collins: No. A quesadilla’s your carb.
You get to choose one carb. Okay. Do you want tomato s- do you want tomato soup and curly fries?
Malcolm Collins: No, [00:49:00] quesadillas.
Simone Collins: Okay. You can have your curly fries with the leftover pork belly t- or, well, pork shoulder in this case tomorrow, yeah?
Malcolm Collins: You’re so amazing, Simone.
Simone Collins: Oh, I’m the worst, I know. Also there is not too far from us a, an arboretum that we haven’t gone to.
Do you wanna take the kids there tomorrow since-
Malcolm Collins: What’s an arboretum?
Simone Collins: It’s gardens. It’s, it’s a, it’s a garden. They have trails. Like, it’s just a different place for us to walk.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It’s free. Sure. You know. Oh, wow, it is close.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Isn’t that crazy? Never been before. Free admission.
Malcolm Collins: That’s
Simone Collins: the whole thing
Malcolm Collins: Oh, no, that’s not what I thought it was.
What was it? Arboretum?
Simone Collins: Jenkins Arboretum and Gardens.
Malcolm Collins: Jenkins Arboretum and Gardens.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Oh.
Simone Collins: It’s really close. And
Malcolm Collins: it’s free to enter?
Simone Collins: Yeah, it’s free to enter always. They have like a little kid [00:50:00] play area. I feel like the kids would really enjoy it.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. If I’m making good progress on the VTuber thing, I wanna try to get the thing done before my call with Leaflet.
Simone Collins: I’ve just noticed that every weekend you wanna do something special. We can do this on a different weekend day, but if we go tomorrow, it will be the least crowded.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Let’s do it.
Simone Collins: Okay. I’m looking forward to it. I mean-
Malcolm Collins: I mean, you know tomorrow is Friday, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah, but we have the kids with us all day.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. And you’re sure we have the kids with us all day?
Simone Collins: I’ll confirm it right now, but yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. All right, love you. All right. I guess we’re going straight to dinner?
Simone Collins: That’s the plan. Yeah, we don’t have enough time to record another episode in like 10 minutes.
Malcolm Collins: Love you. I’ll get Professor Jane ready for tomorrow.
Simone Collins: Yay. ‘Cause I like the title card I created for that. Plus it’s trending. Stop thinking it’s not a big deal ‘
cause it-
Malcolm Collins: But yeah, you see we get the full VTuber exports now. [00:51:00]
Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s really cool. You gave yourself, like, blonde hair though. Are we-
Malcolm Collins: Why? Do you see me with brown hair? Is that what I’m...?
Simone Collins: Yes, you have brown hair. I don’t know what to tell you.
Malcolm Collins: I had blonde hair when I was a kid, and our kids have blonde hair, so.
Simone Collins: So you just internalize yourself as having blonde hair forever?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think it looks more like me when I, when I put, make him with blonde hair.
Simone Collins: That’s so funny. Like, you just kind of anchored to yourself as a teen. I wonder, that, that kind of sticks to my, my feeling like everyone has a s- like a soul age, like an age of their personality, and yours is like 11, in a good way, and mine is like 62, in hopefully a good way.
And I think honestly I would be more comfortable seeing like a VTuber a- avatar of like a white-haired [00:52:00] woman or something than of anything that I looked like as a kid. So I wonder if when people make VTubers of themselves that they just key to whatever their soul age is. You know what I mean?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: You want me to kick us off with this one? You like to do your own kickoffs, so.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. I’ll do a kickoff with this one.
Simone Collins: Okay.
