Very interesting post! However, I have a big disagreement with your interpretation of why the European conquerors succeeded in America, and I think that it undermines much of your conclusion.
In your section titled “What explains these devastating takeovers?” you cite technology and strategic ability, but Old World diseases destroyed the communities in America before the European invaders arrived, most notably smallpox, but also measles, influenza, typhus and the bubonic plague. My reading of historians (from Charles Mann’s book 1493, to Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange and Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel) leads me to conclude that the historical consensus is that the main reason for all of these takeovers was due to Old World diseases, and had relatively little to do with technology or strategy per se.
In Chapter 11 of Guns Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond analyzes the European takeovers in America you cite from the perspective of old World diseases (Here’s a video from a Youtuber named CGP Grey who made a video on the same topic). The basic thesis is that Europeans had acquired immunity from these diseases, whereas people in America hadn’t. From Wikipedia,
After first contacts with Europeans and Africans, some believe that the death of 90–95% of the native population of the New World was caused by Old World diseases.[43] It is suspected that smallpox was the chief culprit and responsible for killing nearly all of the native inhabitants of the Americas.
These diseases were endemic by the time that Cortes and Pizarro arrived on the continent, and therefore it seems very unlikely that their victory was achieved primarily from military and technological might. From Wikipedia again,
The Spanish Franciscan Motolinia left this description: “As the Indians did not know the remedy of the disease…they died in heaps, like bedbugs. In many places it happened that everyone in a house died and, as it was impossible to bury the great number of dead, they pulled down the houses over them so that their homes become their tombs.”[46] On Cortés’s return, he found the Aztec army’s chain of command in ruins. The soldiers who still lived were weak from the disease. Cortés then easily defeated the Aztecs and entered Tenochtitlán.[47] The Spaniards said that they could not walk through the streets without stepping on the bodies of smallpox victims
The effects of smallpox on Tahuantinsuyu (or the Inca empire) were even more devastating. Beginning in Colombia, smallpox spread rapidly before the Spanish invaders first arrived in the empire. The spread was probably aided by the efficient Inca road system. Within months, the disease had killed the Incan EmperorHuayna Capac, his successor, and most of the other leaders. Two of his surviving sons warred for power and, after a bloody and costly war, Atahualpa become the new emperor. As Atahualpa was returning to the capital Cuzco, Francisco Pizarro arrived and through a series of deceits captured the young leader and his best general. Within a few years smallpox claimed between 60% and 90% of the Inca population,[49] with other waves of European disease weakening them further.
The theory that disease was more important than technology is further supported empirically by the fact that Europeans were unable to conquer African tribes/civilizations until the late 19th century, long after the conquest of the New World, despite the fact that many African civilizations had similar or even lower technological capabilities compared to the Inca and Aztecs. The reason is because Africans had immunity to Old World diseases, unlike Americans. However, even in the 19th century conquests, historians often citethe development of the drug quinine, and thus immunity to disease, as one of the primary reasons why European civilizations were able to conquer African nations.
By contrast, I was only able to find one mention of smallpox in your entire post, and the place where you do mention it, you say
Smallpox sweeps through the land, killing many on all sides and causing general chaos.
If I’m reading “all sides” correctly, this is just flat-out incorrect. It killed mainly Americans.
At one point you state that during Pizarro’s conquest,
The Inca empire is in the middle of a civil war and a devastating plague.
This “plague” was smallpox carried from earlier European travelers. Jared Diamond says
The reason for the civil war was that an epidemic of smallpox, spreading overland among South American Indians after its arrival with Spanish settlers in Panama and Colombia, had killed the Inca emperor Huayna Capac and most of his court around 1526, and then immediately killed his designated heir, Ninan Cuyuchi.
You may ask why there was an asymmetry: after all, didn’t the New World have diseases that Europeans were not immune to? Yes, but basically only syphilis. Europeans had exposure to many infectious diseases because those diseases had been acquired from livestock, but livestock was not an important component of American civilizations in the pre-Columbian period.
One reason why disease might not be salient in descriptions of the American conquest is because until modern times, historians emphasized explanations of events in terms of human-factors, such as personalities of rulers and tendencies of groups of people. According to this source, it wasn’t until the 1960s that historians started to take seriously the idea that disease was the primary culprit in the destruction of American civilizations.
There still could be an analogous situation where AI develops diseases that kills humans but not AI, but I think it’s worth exploring this type of existential risk in its own category, and emphasize that this thesis does not depend on a historical precedent of conquerors having strategic or technological advantages.
First response: Disease wasn’t a part of Afonso’s success. It helped the Europeans take over the Americas but did not help them take over Africa or Asia or the middle east; this suggests to me that it may have been a contributing factor but was not the primary explanation / was not strictly necessary.
Second response: Even if we decide that Cortes and Pizarro wouldn’t have been able to succeed without the disease, my overall conclusion still stands. This is because disease isn’t directly the cause of conquistador success, but rather indirectly, via the intermediate steps of “Chaos and disruption” and “Reduced political and economic strength.” (I claim.) And the reduced strength can’t have been more than, say, a 90% reduction in strength. (I claim) Suppose we think of the original conclusion as “A force with a small tech and cunning/experience advantage can take over a region 10,000 times its size.” Then the modified conclusion in light of your claim about disease would be “In times of chaos and disruption, a force with a small tech and cunning/experience advantage can take over a region 1,000 times its size.” This modified conclusion is, as far as I’m concerned, still almost as powerful and interesting as the original conclusion. Because “times of chaos and disruption” are pretty easy to come by. For example, it’s true that the disease may have sparked the Incan civil war—but civil wars happen pretty often anyway, historically. And when civil wars aren’t happening, ordinary wars often are.
Overall, in light of your critique (and also similar things other people have said) I am going to update my original post to include a possible third factor, “Chaos & disruption / disease.” I also look forward to hearing what you have to say in response to my responses.
Nitpick: The war was Cortez + allies vs. Tenochtitlan + allies. The vast majority of people on both sides were Americans. So the smallpox wreaked havoc on all sides. (Maybe I should have said “both sides” instead of “all sides”)
Nitpick: If it turns out that getting sick from various diseases was what kept the Europeans out of Africa for so long, that actually supports my overall argument. (Because, imagine instead that Europeans had no problem with disease in Africa, but simply were unable to conquer much of it due to ordinary military/political reasons. Then their tech+cunning/experience advantage would have failed to be enough in that case, which makes their successes in America seem more like a fluke than a pattern explained by tech+cunning/experience. In other words, if disease wasn’t a factor in Africa, that would be evidence against my claims.)
[ETA: Another way of framing my disagreement is that if you are trying to argue that small groups can take over the world, it seems almost completely irrelevant to focus on relative strategic or technological advantages in light of these historical examples. For instance, it could have theoretically been that some small technologically primitive tribe took over the world if they had some sort of immunity to disease. This would seem to imply that relative strategic advantages in Europeans vs. Americans was not that important. Instead we should focus on what ways AIs could create eg. artificial pandemics, and we could use the smallpox epidemic in America as an example of how devastating pandemics can be.]
First response: Disease wasn’t a part of Afonso’s success. It helped the Europeans take over the Americas but did not help them take over Africa or Asia or the middle east; this suggests to me that it may have been a contributing factor but was not the primary explanation.
That makes sense. I’m much less familiar with Afonso de Albuquerque, though my understanding is that he didn’t really conquer civilizations, mostly just trading ports. I think it’s safe to say that successful military campaigns are common in history, and therefore I don’t find his success very unique or indicative of a future AI takeover.
Second response: Even if we decide that Cortes and Pizarro wouldn’t have been able to succeed without the disease, my overall conclusion still stands.
Well, it depends. If your conclusion is that “small groups with relatively little military or strategic advantages can still take over large areas of the world” then I completely agree. If your conclusion is that, “small military or strategic advantages are by themselves often sufficient for small groups to take over large areas of the world” then I disagree. I worry your post gave the impression that the second conclusion was true.
Then the modified conclusion in light of your claim about disease would be “In times of chaos and disruption, a force with a small tech and cunning/experience advantage can take over a region 1,000 times its size.” This modified conclusion is, as far as I’m concerned, still almost as powerful and interesting as the original conclusion.
A big part of my critique here is that you need to focus way more on getting the true the causal factors that lead to these historical success, because otherwise you can’t use them to argue why AI is going to be anything like it.
Since disease is, in my opinion, the primary causal factor at play here, I think we should instead explore the potential for AI to engineer pandemics that kill everyone—but that seems way different than what you were arguing.
I don’t think making the thesis “in times of chaos and destruction, groups can conquer other groups” really makes the argument say much. The thing that destroyed the Incas and Aztecs was disease, not European military power, so maybe that’s the lesson we should learn? Saying that merely “times of chaos” destroyed the Incas and Aztecs is tautological and not interesting.
For example, it’s true that the disease may have sparked the Incan civil war—but civil wars happen pretty often anyway, historically. And when civil wars aren’t happening, ordinary wars often are.
Yes, but this Incan civil war was particularly extreme and unusual, and from the source I listed, it seems that between 60% and 90% of Incans had died. So again, determining the underlying causal factors is key to this sort of analysis.
Nitpick: The war was Cortez + allies vs. Tenochtitlan + allies. The vast majority of people on both sides were Americans. So the smallpox wreaked havoc on all sides. (Maybe I should have said “both sides” instead of “all sides”)
Yeah that makes sense, but it’s important to note that neither the Aztec nor the Cortez-allied Americans survived in great numbers. It was only the Spanish that were prosperous afterwards, and that’s really important!
Nitpick: If it turns out that getting sick from various diseases was what kept the Europeans out of Africa for so long, that actually supports my overall argument. (Because, imagine instead that Europeans had no problem with disease in Africa, but simply were unable to conquer much of it due to ordinary military/political reasons. Then their tech+cunning/experience advantage would have failed to be enough in that case, which makes their successes in America seem more like a fluke than a pattern explained by tech+cunning/experience. In other words, if disease wasn’t a factor in Africa, that would be evidence against my claims.)
I’m not sure if I understand this point well, but I think I agree. However, the quinine drug treatment for malaria was a technological advantage brought by the industrial revolution, and wasn’t just some innate advantage that the Europeans eventually got.
Another way of framing my disagreement is that if you are trying to argue that small groups can take over the world, it seems almost completely irrelevant to focus on relative strategic or technological advantages in light of these historical examples. For instance, it could have theoretically been that some small technologically primitive tribe took over the world if they had some sort of immunity to disease. This would seem to imply that relative strategic advantages in Europeans vs. Americans was not that important. Instead we should focus on what ways AIs could create eg. artificial pandemics, and we could use the smallpox epidemic in America as an example of how devastating pandemics can be.
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.
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.
That makes sense. I’m much less familiar with Afonso de Albuquerque, though my understanding is that he didn’t really conquer civilizations, mostly just trading ports. I think it’s safe to say that successful military campaigns are common in history, and therefore I don’t find his success very unique or indicative of a future AI takeover.
What difference does it make whether he conquered civilizations or ports? He did a lot of conquering despite being vastly outnumbered. This shows that “on paper” stats like army size are not super useful for determining who is likely to win a fight, at least when one side has a tech+strategic advantage. (Also, Malacca at least was a civilization in its own right; it was a city-state with a much bigger population and military than Afonso had.)
I agree that successful military campaigns are common in history. I think sometimes they can be attributed to luck, or else to genius. I chose these three case studies because they are so close to each other in time and space that they didn’t seem like they could be luck or genius. I admit, however, that as lucy.ea8 said in their comment, perhaps cortes+pizarro won due to disease and then we can say Afonso was lucky or genius without stretching credibility. 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 don’t think making the thesis “in times of chaos and destruction, groups can conquer other groups” really makes the argument say much. The thing that destroyed the Incas and Aztecs was disease, not European military power, so maybe that’s the lesson we should learn? Saying that merely “times of chaos” destroyed the Incas and Aztecs is tautological and not interesting.
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.)
Yeah that makes sense, but it’s important to note that neither the Aztec nor the Cortez-allied Americans survived in great numbers. It was only the Spanish that were prosperous afterwards, and that’s really important!
Even after the disease took its toll, the Spaniards were vastly outnumbered by the Americans. Analogy: Suppose Coronavirus wipes out 90% of the world’s population of asthmatic smoker 90+ yr old men. And suppose that also, the mathematics department at MIT produces more published theorems in 2021 than that entire demographic. The first fact is not the primary explanation for the second fact. Even if Coronavirus didn’t happen and that demographic was not reduced by 90%, the MIT mathematics department still would have produced more published theorems. (And even if this last thing isn’t true—even if by some mathematical coincidence that 90% factor would make the difference—it still wouldn’t be fair to say that disease is the primary factor, it is clearly much less important than e.g. age, specialization, health, etc.)
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.
Regarding Africa, late 19th century technology solved at least *two* crucial problems that prevented European takeover before. One was that Europeans themselves would die to tropical diseases, solved by quinine. The other was that Europeans’ *horses* died to nagana (known as sleeping sickness in humans), solved by steam riverine ships.
Very interesting post! However, I have a big disagreement with your interpretation of why the European conquerors succeeded in America, and I think that it undermines much of your conclusion.
In your section titled “What explains these devastating takeovers?” you cite technology and strategic ability, but Old World diseases destroyed the communities in America before the European invaders arrived, most notably smallpox, but also measles, influenza, typhus and the bubonic plague. My reading of historians (from Charles Mann’s book 1493, to Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange and Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel) leads me to conclude that the historical consensus is that the main reason for all of these takeovers was due to Old World diseases, and had relatively little to do with technology or strategy per se.
In Chapter 11 of Guns Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond analyzes the European takeovers in America you cite from the perspective of old World diseases (Here’s a video from a Youtuber named CGP Grey who made a video on the same topic). The basic thesis is that Europeans had acquired immunity from these diseases, whereas people in America hadn’t. From Wikipedia,
These diseases were endemic by the time that Cortes and Pizarro arrived on the continent, and therefore it seems very unlikely that their victory was achieved primarily from military and technological might. From Wikipedia again,
The theory that disease was more important than technology is further supported empirically by the fact that Europeans were unable to conquer African tribes/civilizations until the late 19th century, long after the conquest of the New World, despite the fact that many African civilizations had similar or even lower technological capabilities compared to the Inca and Aztecs. The reason is because Africans had immunity to Old World diseases, unlike Americans. However, even in the 19th century conquests, historians often citethe development of the drug quinine, and thus immunity to disease, as one of the primary reasons why European civilizations were able to conquer African nations.
By contrast, I was only able to find one mention of smallpox in your entire post, and the place where you do mention it, you say
If I’m reading “all sides” correctly, this is just flat-out incorrect. It killed mainly Americans.
At one point you state that during Pizarro’s conquest,
This “plague” was smallpox carried from earlier European travelers. Jared Diamond says
You may ask why there was an asymmetry: after all, didn’t the New World have diseases that Europeans were not immune to? Yes, but basically only syphilis. Europeans had exposure to many infectious diseases because those diseases had been acquired from livestock, but livestock was not an important component of American civilizations in the pre-Columbian period.
One reason why disease might not be salient in descriptions of the American conquest is because until modern times, historians emphasized explanations of events in terms of human-factors, such as personalities of rulers and tendencies of groups of people. According to this source, it wasn’t until the 1960s that historians started to take seriously the idea that disease was the primary culprit in the destruction of American civilizations.
There still could be an analogous situation where AI develops diseases that kills humans but not AI, but I think it’s worth exploring this type of existential risk in its own category, and emphasize that this thesis does not depend on a historical precedent of conquerors having strategic or technological advantages.
This is a good critique; thank you.
I have two responses, and then a few nitpicks.
First response: Disease wasn’t a part of Afonso’s success. It helped the Europeans take over the Americas but did not help them take over Africa or Asia or the middle east; this suggests to me that it may have been a contributing factor but was not the primary explanation / was not strictly necessary.
Second response: Even if we decide that Cortes and Pizarro wouldn’t have been able to succeed without the disease, my overall conclusion still stands. This is because disease isn’t directly the cause of conquistador success, but rather indirectly, via the intermediate steps of “Chaos and disruption” and “Reduced political and economic strength.” (I claim.) And the reduced strength can’t have been more than, say, a 90% reduction in strength. (I claim) Suppose we think of the original conclusion as “A force with a small tech and cunning/experience advantage can take over a region 10,000 times its size.” Then the modified conclusion in light of your claim about disease would be “In times of chaos and disruption, a force with a small tech and cunning/experience advantage can take over a region 1,000 times its size.” This modified conclusion is, as far as I’m concerned, still almost as powerful and interesting as the original conclusion. Because “times of chaos and disruption” are pretty easy to come by. For example, it’s true that the disease may have sparked the Incan civil war—but civil wars happen pretty often anyway, historically. And when civil wars aren’t happening, ordinary wars often are.
Overall, in light of your critique (and also similar things other people have said) I am going to update my original post to include a possible third factor, “Chaos & disruption / disease.” I also look forward to hearing what you have to say in response to my responses.
Nitpick: The war was Cortez + allies vs. Tenochtitlan + allies. The vast majority of people on both sides were Americans. So the smallpox wreaked havoc on all sides. (Maybe I should have said “both sides” instead of “all sides”)
Nitpick: If it turns out that getting sick from various diseases was what kept the Europeans out of Africa for so long, that actually supports my overall argument. (Because, imagine instead that Europeans had no problem with disease in Africa, but simply were unable to conquer much of it due to ordinary military/political reasons. Then their tech+cunning/experience advantage would have failed to be enough in that case, which makes their successes in America seem more like a fluke than a pattern explained by tech+cunning/experience. In other words, if disease wasn’t a factor in Africa, that would be evidence against my claims.)
[ETA: Another way of framing my disagreement is that if you are trying to argue that small groups can take over the world, it seems almost completely irrelevant to focus on relative strategic or technological advantages in light of these historical examples. For instance, it could have theoretically been that some small technologically primitive tribe took over the world if they had some sort of immunity to disease. This would seem to imply that relative strategic advantages in Europeans vs. Americans was not that important. Instead we should focus on what ways AIs could create eg. artificial pandemics, and we could use the smallpox epidemic in America as an example of how devastating pandemics can be.]
That makes sense. I’m much less familiar with Afonso de Albuquerque, though my understanding is that he didn’t really conquer civilizations, mostly just trading ports. I think it’s safe to say that successful military campaigns are common in history, and therefore I don’t find his success very unique or indicative of a future AI takeover.
Well, it depends. If your conclusion is that “small groups with relatively little military or strategic advantages can still take over large areas of the world” then I completely agree. If your conclusion is that, “small military or strategic advantages are by themselves often sufficient for small groups to take over large areas of the world” then I disagree. I worry your post gave the impression that the second conclusion was true.
A big part of my critique here is that you need to focus way more on getting the true the causal factors that lead to these historical success, because otherwise you can’t use them to argue why AI is going to be anything like it.
Since disease is, in my opinion, the primary causal factor at play here, I think we should instead explore the potential for AI to engineer pandemics that kill everyone—but that seems way different than what you were arguing.
I don’t think making the thesis “in times of chaos and destruction, groups can conquer other groups” really makes the argument say much. The thing that destroyed the Incas and Aztecs was disease, not European military power, so maybe that’s the lesson we should learn? Saying that merely “times of chaos” destroyed the Incas and Aztecs is tautological and not interesting.
Yes, but this Incan civil war was particularly extreme and unusual, and from the source I listed, it seems that between 60% and 90% of Incans had died. So again, determining the underlying causal factors is key to this sort of analysis.
Yeah that makes sense, but it’s important to note that neither the Aztec nor the Cortez-allied Americans survived in great numbers. It was only the Spanish that were prosperous afterwards, and that’s really important!
I’m not sure if I understand this point well, but I think I agree. However, the quinine drug treatment for malaria was a technological advantage brought by the industrial revolution, and wasn’t just some innate advantage that the Europeans eventually got.
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.
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.
What difference does it make whether he conquered civilizations or ports? He did a lot of conquering despite being vastly outnumbered. This shows that “on paper” stats like army size are not super useful for determining who is likely to win a fight, at least when one side has a tech+strategic advantage. (Also, Malacca at least was a civilization in its own right; it was a city-state with a much bigger population and military than Afonso had.)
I agree that successful military campaigns are common in history. I think sometimes they can be attributed to luck, or else to genius. I chose these three case studies because they are so close to each other in time and space that they didn’t seem like they could be luck or genius. I admit, however, that as lucy.ea8 said in their comment, perhaps cortes+pizarro won due to disease and then we can say Afonso was lucky or genius without stretching credibility. 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.
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.)
Even after the disease took its toll, the Spaniards were vastly outnumbered by the Americans. Analogy: Suppose Coronavirus wipes out 90% of the world’s population of asthmatic smoker 90+ yr old men. And suppose that also, the mathematics department at MIT produces more published theorems in 2021 than that entire demographic. The first fact is not the primary explanation for the second fact. Even if Coronavirus didn’t happen and that demographic was not reduced by 90%, the MIT mathematics department still would have produced more published theorems. (And even if this last thing isn’t true—even if by some mathematical coincidence that 90% factor would make the difference—it still wouldn’t be fair to say that disease is the primary factor, it is clearly much less important than e.g. age, specialization, health, etc.)
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.
Regarding Africa, late 19th century technology solved at least *two* crucial problems that prevented European takeover before. One was that Europeans themselves would die to tropical diseases, solved by quinine. The other was that Europeans’ *horses* died to nagana (known as sleeping sickness in humans), solved by steam riverine ships.
Makes sense. I’d heard this about quinine before, but didn’t know about nagana.