In this episode I interview Ivan Eland, defense analyst and writer, who is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute. We talk about the current and future state of U.S. military foreign policy in the post Cold War era. We address a number of questions in this wide-ranging discusion. What threats do China and Russia pose to world peace? How can we bring the bloated defense budget under control? Will the U.S. fall victim to the Thucydides Trap? What type of foreign policy strategy should we implement to deal with ongoing threats and with regions like the Middle East, Latin America and Africa?

https://www.independent.org/person/ivan-eland/

https://www.independent.org/research/centers/copal/

https://www.amazon.com/Balance-Titans-Peace-Liberty-Multipolar-ebook

If you want an AI to "play nice", you need to give it values to ensure it is acting beneficially toward humans. To solve this alignment problem we need to know what values we are talking about. Today I describe a five-level classification system which helps us to understand all values and how they relate to one another. These include survival, cognition, those related to individuality and sociality, and a concern for the wider environment. We then look at how to apply these to AI systems and examine several critiques of the theory.

There is a lot of talk about AI alignment, which is getting machines to act in our best interests. But how do we go about doing this? The philosophical secret to this conundrum is values. But how do we determine what human values are? This problem needs to be solved before we program computers to do this or that on our behalf. In this two-part series, I discuss what values are and look at evidence on human values coming from evolutionary theory, literature reviews and survey research. The talk rounds out with the contentious debate on whether human values are relative or universal.

Ethics and Universal Values

Save Our Civilization

Moral Psychology