I agree that it would be good to think about how AI might create devastating pandemics. I suspect it wouldn’t be that hard to do, for an AI that is generally smarter than us. However, I think my original point still stands.
It’s worth clarifying exactly what “original point” stands because I’m currently unsure.
I don’t get why you think a small technologically primitive tribe could take over the world if they were immune to disease. Seems very implausible to me.
Sorry, I meant to say, “Were immune to diseases that were currently killing everyone else.” If everyone is dying around you, then your level of technology doesn’t really matter that much. You just wait for your enemy to die and then settle the land after they are gone. This is arguably what Europeans did in America. My point is that by focusing on technology, you are missing the main reason for the successful conquest.
But I don’t want to do this yet, because it seems to me that even with disease factored in, “most” of the “credit” for Cortes and Pizarro’s success goes to the factors I mentioned.
After all, suppose the disease reduced the on-paper strength of the Americans by 90%. They were still several orders of magnitude stronger than Cortes and Pizarro. So it’s still surprising that Cortes/Pizarro won… until we factor in the technological and strategic advantages I mentioned.
I feel like you don’t actually have a civilization if 90% of your people died. I think it’s more fair to say that when 90% of your people die, your civilization basically stops existing rather than just being weakened. For example, I can totally imagine an Incan voyage to Spain conquering Madrid if 90% of the Spanish died. Their chain of command would be in complete shambles. It wouldn’t just be like some clean 90% reduction in GDP with everything else held constant.
But the civilizations wouldn’t have been destroyed without the Spaniards. (I might be wrong about this, but… hadn’t the disease mostly swept through Inca territory by the time Pizarro arrived? So clearly their civilization had survived.)
I think I am somewhat close to being convinced by your criticism, at least when phrased in the way you just did: “your thesis is trivial!” But I’m not yet convinced, because of my argument about the 90% reduction. (I keep making the same argument basically in response to all your points; it is the crux for me I think.)
Look, if 90% of a country dies of a disease, and then the surviving 10% become engulfed in a civil war, and then some military group who is immune to the disease comes in and takes the capital city during this all, don’t you think it’s very misleading to conclude “A small group of people with a slight military advantage can take over a large civilization” without heavily emphasizing the whole 90% of people dying of a disease part? This is the heart of my critique.
My original point was that sometimes, a small group can reliably take over a large region despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned, having only slightly better tech and cunning, knowing very little about the region to be conquered, and being disunited. This is in the context of arguments about how much of a lead in AI tech one needs to have to take over the world, and how big of an entity one needs to be to do it (e.g. can a rogue AI do it? What about a corporation? A nation-state?) Even with your point about disease, it still seems I’m right about this, for reasons I’ve mentioned (the 90% argument)
I really don’t think the disease thing is important enough to undermine my conclusion. For the two reasons I gave: One, Afonso didn’t benefit from disease, and two, the 90% argument: Suppose there was no disease but instead the Aztecs and Incas were 90% smaller in population and also in the middle of civil war. Same result would have happened, and it still would have proved my point.
I don’t think a group of Incans in Spain could have taken it over if 90% of the Spaniards were dying of disease. I think they wouldn’t have had the technology or experience necessary to succeed.
Is this a fair description of your disagreement re the 90% argument?
Daniel thinks that a 90% reduction in the population of a civilization corresponds to a ~90% reduction in their power/influentialness. Because the Americans so greatly outnumbered the Spanish, this ten-fold reduction in power/influentialness doesn’t much alter the conclusion.
Matthew thinks that a 90% reduction in the population of a civilization means that “you don’t really have a civilization”, which I interpret to mean something like a ~99.9%+ reduction in the power/influentialness of a civilization, which occurs mainly through a reduction in their ability to coordinate (e.g. “chain of command in ruins”). This is significant enough to undermine the main conclusion.
If this is accurate, would a historical survey of the power/influentialness of civilisations after they lose 90% of the population (inasmuch as these cases exist) resolve the disagreement?
For my part, I think you summarized my position fairly well. However, after thinking about this argument for another few days, I have more points to add.
Disease seems especially likely to cause coordination failures since it’s an internal threat rather than an external threat (which unlike internal threats, tend to unite empires). We can compare the effects of the smallpox epidemic in the Aztec and Inca empires alongside other historical diseases during wartime, such as the Plauge of Athens which arguably is what caused Athens to lose the Peloponnesian War.
Along these same lines, the Aztec/Inca didn’t have any germ theory of disease, and therefore didn’t understand what was going on. They may have thought that the gods were punishing them for some reason, and therefore they probably spent a lot of time blaming random groups for the catastrophe. We can contrast these circumstances to eg. the Paraguayan War which killed up to 90% of the male population, but people probably had a much better idea what was going on and who was to blame, so I expect that the surviving population had an easier time coordinating.
A large chunk of the remaining population likely had some sort of disability. Think of what would happen if you got measles and smallpox in the same two year window: even if you survived it probably wouldn’t look good. This means that the pure death rate is an underestimate of the impact of a disease. The Aztecs, for whom “only” 40 percent died of disease, were still greatly affected
It killed many of its victims outright, particularly infants and young children. Many other adults were incapacitated by the disease – because they were either sick themselves, caring for sick relatives and neighbors, or simply lost the will to resist the Spaniards as they saw disease ravage those around them. Finally, people could no longer tend to their crops, leading to widespread famine, further weakening the immune systems of survivors of the epidemic. [...] a third of those afflicted with the disease typically develop blindness.
I accept that these points are evidence in your favor. Here are some more of my own:
--Smallpox didn’t hit the Aztecs until Cortes had already killed the Emperor and allied with the Tlaxcalans, if I’m reading these summaries correctly. (I really should go read the actual books...) So it seems that Cortes did get really far on the path towards victory without the help of disease. More importantly, there doesn’t seem to be any important difference in how people treated Cortes before or after the disease. They took him very seriously, underestimated him, put too much trust in him, allied with him, etc. before the disease was a factor.
--When Pizarro arrived in Inca lands, the disease had already swept through, if I’m reading these stories right. So the period of most chaos and uncertainty was over; people were rebuilding and re-organizing.
--Also, it wasn’t actually a 90% reduction in population. It was more like a 50% reduction at the time, if I am remembering right. (Later epidemics would cause further damage, so collectively they were worse than any other plague in history.) This is comparable to e.g. the Black Death in Europe, no? But the Black Death didn’t result in the collapse of most civilizations who went through it, nor did it result in random small groups of adventurers taking over governments, I predict. (I haven’t actually read up on the history of it)
The Plague of Justinian is possibly responsible for the failure of the Roman Empire to reunite (Justinian had reconquered Italy and if he was able to secure those holdings European history might look more like Chinese history). Later iterations of the plague might have been responsible for the rise of the Muslim empires. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinianhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22992565/
Interesting, thanks! Still though, it’s not like the Roman Empire got taken over by some wandering band of 1,000 men during the plague. My position is not that plagues aren’t important, but rather that they aren’t so overwhelmingly important that the factors I mentioned (tech, cunning/experience) aren’t also very important.
Thanks Alexis, this seems like an accurate description to me. Strong-upvoted, partly because I want to reward people for doing these sorts of summary-and-distillation stuff.
As for your question, hmm, I’m not sure. I tentatively say yes, but my hesitations are (1) cases where 90% of the population dies are probably very rare, and (2) how would we measure power anyway? Presumably most civilizations that lose 90% of their population do end up conquered by someone else pretty quickly, since most civilizations aren’t 10x more powerful than all their neighbors.
I think the crux is this business about the chain of command. Cortez and Pizarro succeeded by getting Americans to ally with them and/or obey them. The crux is, would they have been able to do this as well or mostly as well without the disease? I think that reading a bunch of books on what happened might more or less answer this question.
For example, maybe the books will say that the general disarray caused by the disease created a sense of desperation and confusion in the people which led them to be open to the conquistador’s proposals when otherwise they would have dismissed them. In which case, I concede defeat in this disagreement. Or maybe the books will say that if only the conquistadors had been outnumbered even more, they would have lost.
But what I predict is that the books will say that, for the most part, the reasons why people allied with Cortes and Pizarro had more to do with non-disease considerations: “Here is this obviously powerful representative of an obviously powerful faraway empire, wielding intriguing technology that we could benefit from. There is our hated enemy, Tenochtitlan, who has been oppressing us for decades. Now is our chance to turn the tables on our oppressors!” Similarly, I predict that the reason why the emperors allowed the conquistadors to get close enough to ambush them have little to do with disease and more to do with, well, just not predicting that the conquistadors would have the will or capability to do that. Moreover I predict that adding even more native warriors (due to the disease not happening) wouldn’t have caused the conquistadors to lose. After all, roughly half of those warriors would be added to the conquistador’s side...
So I highly recommend that someone who doesn’t have a dog in this fight go read some books on Cortes and Pizarro and then report back!
Update: I do think it would be good to look at the Black Death in Europe and see whether there were similar political “upsets” where a small group of outsiders took over a large region in the turmoil. I predict that there mostly weren’t; if it turns out this did happen a fair amount, then I agree that is good evidence that disease was really important.
I really don’t think the disease thing is important enough to undermine my conclusion. For the two reasons I gave: One, Afonso didn’t benefit from disease
This makes sense, but I think the case of Afonso is sufficiently different from the others that it’s a bit of a stretch to use it to imply much about AI takeovers. I think if you want to make a more general point about how AI can be militarily successful, then a better point of evidence is a broad survey of historical military campaigns. Of course, it’s still a historically interesting case to consider!
two, the 90% argument: Suppose there was no disease but instead the Aztecs and Incas were 90% smaller in population and also in the middle of civil war. Same result would have happened, and it still would have proved my point.
Yeah but why are we assuming that they are still in the civil war? Call me out if I’m wrong here, but your thesis now seems to be: if some civilization is in complete disarray, then a well coordinated group of slightly more advanced people/AI can take control of the civilization.
This would be a reasonable thesis, but it doesn’t shed too much light on AI takeovers. The important part lies in the “if some civilization is in complete disarray” conditional, and I think it’s far from obvious that AI will emerge in such a world, unless some other more important causal factor already occurred that gave rise to the massive disarray in the first place. But even in that case, don’t you think we should focus on that thing that caused the disarray instead?
Again, I certainly agree that it would be good to think about things that could cause disarray as well. Like you said, maybe an AI could easily arrange for there to be a convenient pandemic at about the time it makes its move...
And yeah, in light of your pushback I’m thinking of moderating my thesis to add the “disarray background condition” caveat. (I already edited the OP)This does weaken the claim, but not much, I think, because the sort of disarray needed is relatively common, I think. For purposes of Cortes and Pizarro takeover, what mattered was that they were able to find local factions willing to ally with them to overthrow the main power structures. The population count wasn’t super relevant because, disease or no, it was several orders of magnitude more than Cortez & Pizarro had. And while it’s true that without the disease they may have had a harder time finding local factions willing to ally with them, it’s not obviously true, and moreover there are plenty of ordinary circumstances (ordinary civil wars, ordinary periods of unrest and rebellion, ordinary wars between great powers) that lead to the same result: Local factions being willing to ally with an outsider to overthrow the main power structure.
This conversation has definitely made me less confident in my conclusion. I now think it would be worth it for me (or someone) to go do a bunch of history reading, to evaluate these debates with more information.
It’s worth clarifying exactly what “original point” stands because I’m currently unsure.
Sorry, I meant to say, “Were immune to diseases that were currently killing everyone else.” If everyone is dying around you, then your level of technology doesn’t really matter that much. You just wait for your enemy to die and then settle the land after they are gone. This is arguably what Europeans did in America. My point is that by focusing on technology, you are missing the main reason for the successful conquest.
I feel like you don’t actually have a civilization if 90% of your people died. I think it’s more fair to say that when 90% of your people die, your civilization basically stops existing rather than just being weakened. For example, I can totally imagine an Incan voyage to Spain conquering Madrid if 90% of the Spanish died. Their chain of command would be in complete shambles. It wouldn’t just be like some clean 90% reduction in GDP with everything else held constant.
Look, if 90% of a country dies of a disease, and then the surviving 10% become engulfed in a civil war, and then some military group who is immune to the disease comes in and takes the capital city during this all, don’t you think it’s very misleading to conclude “A small group of people with a slight military advantage can take over a large civilization” without heavily emphasizing the whole 90% of people dying of a disease part? This is the heart of my critique.
My original point was that sometimes, a small group can reliably take over a large region despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned, having only slightly better tech and cunning, knowing very little about the region to be conquered, and being disunited. This is in the context of arguments about how much of a lead in AI tech one needs to have to take over the world, and how big of an entity one needs to be to do it (e.g. can a rogue AI do it? What about a corporation? A nation-state?) Even with your point about disease, it still seems I’m right about this, for reasons I’ve mentioned (the 90% argument)
I really don’t think the disease thing is important enough to undermine my conclusion. For the two reasons I gave: One, Afonso didn’t benefit from disease, and two, the 90% argument: Suppose there was no disease but instead the Aztecs and Incas were 90% smaller in population and also in the middle of civil war. Same result would have happened, and it still would have proved my point.
I don’t think a group of Incans in Spain could have taken it over if 90% of the Spaniards were dying of disease. I think they wouldn’t have had the technology or experience necessary to succeed.
Is this a fair description of your disagreement re the 90% argument?
Daniel thinks that a 90% reduction in the population of a civilization corresponds to a ~90% reduction in their power/influentialness. Because the Americans so greatly outnumbered the Spanish, this ten-fold reduction in power/influentialness doesn’t much alter the conclusion.
Matthew thinks that a 90% reduction in the population of a civilization means that “you don’t really have a civilization”, which I interpret to mean something like a ~99.9%+ reduction in the power/influentialness of a civilization, which occurs mainly through a reduction in their ability to coordinate (e.g. “chain of command in ruins”). This is significant enough to undermine the main conclusion.
If this is accurate, would a historical survey of the power/influentialness of civilisations after they lose 90% of the population (inasmuch as these cases exist) resolve the disagreement?
For my part, I think you summarized my position fairly well. However, after thinking about this argument for another few days, I have more points to add.
Disease seems especially likely to cause coordination failures since it’s an internal threat rather than an external threat (which unlike internal threats, tend to unite empires). We can compare the effects of the smallpox epidemic in the Aztec and Inca empires alongside other historical diseases during wartime, such as the Plauge of Athens which arguably is what caused Athens to lose the Peloponnesian War.
Along these same lines, the Aztec/Inca didn’t have any germ theory of disease, and therefore didn’t understand what was going on. They may have thought that the gods were punishing them for some reason, and therefore they probably spent a lot of time blaming random groups for the catastrophe. We can contrast these circumstances to eg. the Paraguayan War which killed up to 90% of the male population, but people probably had a much better idea what was going on and who was to blame, so I expect that the surviving population had an easier time coordinating.
A large chunk of the remaining population likely had some sort of disability. Think of what would happen if you got measles and smallpox in the same two year window: even if you survived it probably wouldn’t look good. This means that the pure death rate is an underestimate of the impact of a disease. The Aztecs, for whom “only” 40 percent died of disease, were still greatly affected
I accept that these points are evidence in your favor. Here are some more of my own:
--Smallpox didn’t hit the Aztecs until Cortes had already killed the Emperor and allied with the Tlaxcalans, if I’m reading these summaries correctly. (I really should go read the actual books...) So it seems that Cortes did get really far on the path towards victory without the help of disease. More importantly, there doesn’t seem to be any important difference in how people treated Cortes before or after the disease. They took him very seriously, underestimated him, put too much trust in him, allied with him, etc. before the disease was a factor.
--When Pizarro arrived in Inca lands, the disease had already swept through, if I’m reading these stories right. So the period of most chaos and uncertainty was over; people were rebuilding and re-organizing.
--Also, it wasn’t actually a 90% reduction in population. It was more like a 50% reduction at the time, if I am remembering right. (Later epidemics would cause further damage, so collectively they were worse than any other plague in history.) This is comparable to e.g. the Black Death in Europe, no? But the Black Death didn’t result in the collapse of most civilizations who went through it, nor did it result in random small groups of adventurers taking over governments, I predict. (I haven’t actually read up on the history of it)
The Plague of Justinian is possibly responsible for the failure of the Roman Empire to reunite (Justinian had reconquered Italy and if he was able to secure those holdings European history might look more like Chinese history). Later iterations of the plague might have been responsible for the rise of the Muslim empires. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22992565/
Interesting, thanks! Still though, it’s not like the Roman Empire got taken over by some wandering band of 1,000 men during the plague. My position is not that plagues aren’t important, but rather that they aren’t so overwhelmingly important that the factors I mentioned (tech, cunning/experience) aren’t also very important.
Thanks Alexis, this seems like an accurate description to me. Strong-upvoted, partly because I want to reward people for doing these sorts of summary-and-distillation stuff.
As for your question, hmm, I’m not sure. I tentatively say yes, but my hesitations are (1) cases where 90% of the population dies are probably very rare, and (2) how would we measure power anyway? Presumably most civilizations that lose 90% of their population do end up conquered by someone else pretty quickly, since most civilizations aren’t 10x more powerful than all their neighbors.
I think the crux is this business about the chain of command. Cortez and Pizarro succeeded by getting Americans to ally with them and/or obey them. The crux is, would they have been able to do this as well or mostly as well without the disease? I think that reading a bunch of books on what happened might more or less answer this question.
For example, maybe the books will say that the general disarray caused by the disease created a sense of desperation and confusion in the people which led them to be open to the conquistador’s proposals when otherwise they would have dismissed them. In which case, I concede defeat in this disagreement. Or maybe the books will say that if only the conquistadors had been outnumbered even more, they would have lost.
But what I predict is that the books will say that, for the most part, the reasons why people allied with Cortes and Pizarro had more to do with non-disease considerations: “Here is this obviously powerful representative of an obviously powerful faraway empire, wielding intriguing technology that we could benefit from. There is our hated enemy, Tenochtitlan, who has been oppressing us for decades. Now is our chance to turn the tables on our oppressors!” Similarly, I predict that the reason why the emperors allowed the conquistadors to get close enough to ambush them have little to do with disease and more to do with, well, just not predicting that the conquistadors would have the will or capability to do that. Moreover I predict that adding even more native warriors (due to the disease not happening) wouldn’t have caused the conquistadors to lose. After all, roughly half of those warriors would be added to the conquistador’s side...
So I highly recommend that someone who doesn’t have a dog in this fight go read some books on Cortes and Pizarro and then report back!
Update: I do think it would be good to look at the Black Death in Europe and see whether there were similar political “upsets” where a small group of outsiders took over a large region in the turmoil. I predict that there mostly weren’t; if it turns out this did happen a fair amount, then I agree that is good evidence that disease was really important.
This makes sense, but I think the case of Afonso is sufficiently different from the others that it’s a bit of a stretch to use it to imply much about AI takeovers. I think if you want to make a more general point about how AI can be militarily successful, then a better point of evidence is a broad survey of historical military campaigns. Of course, it’s still a historically interesting case to consider!
Yeah but why are we assuming that they are still in the civil war? Call me out if I’m wrong here, but your thesis now seems to be: if some civilization is in complete disarray, then a well coordinated group of slightly more advanced people/AI can take control of the civilization.
This would be a reasonable thesis, but it doesn’t shed too much light on AI takeovers. The important part lies in the “if some civilization is in complete disarray” conditional, and I think it’s far from obvious that AI will emerge in such a world, unless some other more important causal factor already occurred that gave rise to the massive disarray in the first place. But even in that case, don’t you think we should focus on that thing that caused the disarray instead?
Again, I certainly agree that it would be good to think about things that could cause disarray as well. Like you said, maybe an AI could easily arrange for there to be a convenient pandemic at about the time it makes its move...
And yeah, in light of your pushback I’m thinking of moderating my thesis to add the “disarray background condition” caveat. (I already edited the OP)This does weaken the claim, but not much, I think, because the sort of disarray needed is relatively common, I think. For purposes of Cortes and Pizarro takeover, what mattered was that they were able to find local factions willing to ally with them to overthrow the main power structures. The population count wasn’t super relevant because, disease or no, it was several orders of magnitude more than Cortez & Pizarro had. And while it’s true that without the disease they may have had a harder time finding local factions willing to ally with them, it’s not obviously true, and moreover there are plenty of ordinary circumstances (ordinary civil wars, ordinary periods of unrest and rebellion, ordinary wars between great powers) that lead to the same result: Local factions being willing to ally with an outsider to overthrow the main power structure.
This conversation has definitely made me less confident in my conclusion. I now think it would be worth it for me (or someone) to go do a bunch of history reading, to evaluate these debates with more information.