Poker is fun, AI is intimidating: Nate Silver tries to find overlap

Nate Silver has a lot to say about poker players, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley and the future of artificial intelligence. His knowledge of statistics and modern information technology is broad. His writing is often captivating and the quotes he receives from prominent interviewees are entertaining and informative. But his latest book, On the edge: The art of risking everything (Penguin, 2024) is a fascinating, poorly constructed mess.

The first half of the book, which is mostly about the world of casinos and professional poker players, is an entertaining kind of pop sociology. “Professional Gambler” seems like a glamorous and fun profession that many readers have probably dreamed of at some point in their lives. The second half of the book delves into the possibility of fraudulent computer applications triggering an apocalypse that could destroy all of human civilization. Contemplating this prospect is potentially fascinating, but somewhat of a downer.

Silver argues that a coherent whole can emerge from these two halves and warns readers not to skip straight to the apocalypse. Whether this is true must be left to the judgment of each individual reader (Caveat Emptor). Although the book is a bit exaggerated, it addresses some of the most important economic and philosophical questions being debated today about artificial intelligence and the role of business and government in managing long-term risks.

For example, we might want a market-oriented economy because that is the path that has historically given us the most growth and the highest standards of living. But what if governments that are cautious about the technology end up allowing an AI application to emerge that destroys the world? After all, we wouldn’t allow Microsoft and Google to make their own nuclear warheads.

But this is not the usual conflict between profit-maximizing corporate types and ostensibly public-minded government regulators. Silver argues that the people most aggressively pursuing AI development aren’t just ordinary business people. They are a very specific and special subset of capitalists – they are part of the “river,” as it describes the world of highly rational men and women with great willingness to take risks and a cool, dispassionate view of potentially negative consequences. The gamers, crypto developers, hedge fund investors and academic philosophers who are part of the flow are more likely to support the development of more powerful AI applications for their own intellectual reasons and are more likely to find higher levels of risk tolerable.

Silver pits the river against what he calls the village. The residents of the village are the left-liberal politicians and educated professionals most likely to roll their eyes at the mention of Bitcoin – people in the mainstream media, in the social science departments of elite universities, and in the leadership of the Democratic Party. Silver says Silicon Valley’s Riverians tend to view people in the Village as “neurotic scolds.” Consider Hillary Clinton and her 1996 book “It Takes a Village.” The way Silver describes the village is somewhat similar to what people like Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) call the cathedral or, to the extent that many village institutions are dominated by women, the nave.

Of course, not everyone is in the river or in the village. Unlike some sociological or political typologies that attempt to place the entire population into a new category, Silver’s two groups are elite classifications that actually include only a handful of the most influential and respected people in society. But both groups are unusually influential in their own way. And the most prominent members of each clan have their own rabid fan base, be it Peter Thiel and Team River or, say, Elizabeth Warren and Team Village.

These affinities are also evidently due to the current political divide between red and blue in the US, although Silver is quick to point out that Donald Trump is not part of the river. While Trump is certainly competitive and a risk-taker (and despised by the opposing team), according to Silver, he has “shown little of the ability for abstract, analytical thinking that characterizes people on the river.”

Silver’s ability to give uninitiated readers a concise tutorial on AI development while thoroughly considering its long-term societal implications is a rare skill, and both newcomers and tech enthusiasts are sure to find plenty of interesting material to engage with. However, it is precisely this skill that will make some readers wonder why he spends so much time in the first half of the book creating personality profiles about bizarre villains from the world of professional gambling, rather than getting to the point where lives are supposedly at stake and death goes AI development. For example, he spends many pages examining in great detail a scandal surrounding alleged cheating at a livestream poker tournament in 2022. While this controversial surprise victory was undoubtedly fascinating for obsessive poker fans like Silver, it lacks an obvious connection to the world of rationalist philosophy and computer science that we are ultimately meant to engage with.

And as the subtitle suggests, the real weight of the book lies in its reflections on computing power and the potential destruction of AI, rather than the latest casino action. Companies like OpenAI, their critics say, are truly risking “everything” by moving to more powerful computer models and applications as quickly as possible. In the world of gambling, which Silver says is necessary to understand the challenges of the AI ​​revolution, it’s not about that at all – making money at poker means making very limited plays that prolong the ability to keep playing. As Silver briefly mentions as a thought experiment, no one bets on literal games of Russian roulette.

Unfortunately, the discrepancy between half of the book saying “poker is fun” and half “AI is potentially scary” is just one of the book’s organizational problems. Silver, for example, begins with a clearly defined dichotomy in “The River vs. the Village” that will likely be easy to understand for the many readers who know him best from 538, the popular politics website he founded. But he also divides the people he writes about into further subgroups and causes confusion.

For example, Silver uses the cognitive dichotomy that mid-century philosopher Isiah Berlin described of the hedgehog and the fox (i.e., “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”). In his discussion of foxes and hedgehogs, he further divides people into “outsiders” and “mediators.” Therefore, everyone mentioned in the book, from casino mogul Steve Wynn to AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, may be a combination of a 2x2x2 matrix made up of these three opposing sets of features. That makes things a little muddy.

In addition, Silver sometimes tries to personalize the process of reading the book by describing it with various, not entirely consistent, metaphors. Right from the start we learn that he’s taking us on a trip, cheerfully advising us to “buckle up” and “bring a few bucks to play” because “there are poker games in the back of the bus.” But then, in the second half of the book, it becomes a performance that we observe. Silver tells us that “Chapter 6, Illusion, is the first of three chapters that can be thought of as a book within a book, structured like a five-act play.”

Even the numbering of the chapters themselves, a progression that occurs without obvious novelty in most books, is clearly visible here. The book itself is divided into Part 1 and Part 2. Part 1 consists of Chapter 1 through Chapter 4. After Chapter 4, counterintuitively, comes Chapter 13, a nod to Silver’s “Thirteen Habits of Highly Effective Risk Takers” in the style of Steven Covey. ” Part 2 consists of Chapter 5 through Chapter 8 (three out of four of which contain the book within a book that is also a five-act play). After Chapter 8 comes Chapter ∞ (Infinity Symbol), which readers can certainly assume is the last. But Silver’s mischievous delight in the non-standard numbering is still not satisfied, and the final chapter (the second of the two-part conclusion) is Chapter 1776, an allusion to the founding principles of the United States. Is this all clear?

The fact that On the Edge wasn’t quickly split into two separate projects by an experienced editor is undoubtedly because Silver has built a significant public platform and presumably now has the clout of the publishing industry – after the success of 2012 The signal and the noise – to resist even the most obviously necessary editorial interventions. At one point he even mentions that he became so famous that it was “a challenge to stay grounded in his values.” Perhaps it has also become a challenge to accept criticism of your own writing projects.

The book’s quirky design (and some tricks in the audiobook version, such as Silver imitating a celebrity’s voice while reading quotes from famous interviewees) were undoubtedly fun for Silver personally. They quickly become tiring and distract the reader and listener.

Anyone interested in professional gambling or AI technology will no doubt be excited to dive into each halves of the book. Nate Silver superfans aside, the real test will be how big of a Venn diagram overlap between these two individually interesting topics will be to the general readership.