“Video and transcript of talk on ‘Can goodness compete?’” by Joe Carlsmith

Author: LessWrong ([email protected])
Published: Thu 17 Jul 2025
Episode Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/evYne4Xx7L9J96BHW/video-and-transcript-of-talk-on-can-goodness-compete

(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.)

Introduction

Thank you. Okay. Hi. Thanks for coming.

Aims for this talk

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 [...]

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Outline:

(00:30) Introduction

(00:50) Aims for this talk

(01:54) Basic vibe

(03:28) Lineage of concern

(04:31) What I mean by goodness

(07:23) What I mean by competition

(09:27) Can \*humans\* compete?

(11:21) Some distinctions

(14:17) Alignment taxes

(16:52) More fundamental variants