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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says AI companies like his may need to be taxed to offset a coming employment crisis: He worries that entry-level white-collar jobs could be replaced within 1–5 years. “Even if our company stopped… all the other companies would continue. And if they didn't, China would beat us.” The bus can't be stopped, he says. But maybe it can be steered.

In my studies of how orders have changed throughout history, I have seen how changes from republic-style representative democracies to autocracies typically happen. These changes are exemplified in how Julius Caesar in ancient Rome (from 49 to 44 BCE), Napoleon Bonaparte in France (from 1799 to 1815), Benito Mussolini in Italy (from 1922 to 1943), Adolf Hitler in Germany (from 1933 to 1945), a consortium of leaders in Japan (from 1931 to 1945), Francisco Franco in Spain (from 1936 to 1975), Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey (from 2016 until now), and many other countries’ leaders have shifted to become autocratic leaders. I also read about it in Plato’s Republic, written around 375 BCE, which is still a valuable description of how democracies become autocracies.