Lessons on AI Takeover from the conquistadors

Bird Concept

You could just poke the gun out and it would do the shooting I also think being substantially more accurate would make cover fire a lot more effective. And that could allow you to be much more mobile on the battlefield. Anyhow, this is just one example.

The most obvious example to me is a Stuart Russell slaughterbot - although those aren't really plausible near-future technologies at this point since they already exist. Using some really good AI to control them directly (deep RL becomes good enough for effective robot control?), along with some high energy density battery storage might make them long-range and much more lethal. Though countermeasures (directed energy weapons) do exist and are being researched.

Military takeover is a diplomatic process in which you convince people to obey you. You do that by offering a better Schelling point than rival claimants to the throne, and by defeating your rivals in battle. You don't need to defeat them all at once; you can start small and scale up.

I think there's another element to it. In Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond argued that a lot of the reason for the conquistador's successes came down to their abilities to do things that were outside the frame of reference of the native culture, like invite the Emperor to parley and then just kidnap him. In other words, to the Inca the conquistadors exhibited a weak kind of cognitive uncontainability, furthering the analogy with AI takeover.

Voiceover: Pizarro and his most trusted officers debate their options for how to deal with Ataxalpa. Some advise caution, but Pizarro insists their best chance is to launch a surprise attack the next day. It’s a tactic that’s worked successfully in the past. Twelve years before Pizarro went to Peru, another famous conquistador, Hernan Cortez, had gone to Mexico and encountered another formidable civilization; the Aztecs. He conquered the country by kidnapping the Aztec leader and exploiting the ensuing chaos. Cortez’s story was later published and became a bestseller, a handbook for any would-be conquistador. It can still be found in the great library of Salamanca University in Northern Spain.

Jared Diamond: This wonderful library here can be thought of among other things as a repository of dirty tricks, because in these books are the accounts of what generals had been doing to other generals for thousands of years in the past and across much of Eurasia, and here from this library we have a famous account of the conquest of Mexico with all the details of what Cortez did to the Aztecs and what worked. That was a model for Pizarro to give him ideas what exactly to try out on the Incas, whereas the Incas without writing, had only local knowledge transmitted by oral memory, and they were unsophisticated and naïve compared to the Spaniards because of writing.

[-]Randaly5y*60

On Diamond and writing, see previous discussion here. It is highly unlikely that writing was critical:

Pizarro was illiterate
The Aztecs had writing, yet didn't beat the Spaniards (or avoid having their leader kidnapped)
Cortes' conquests were only a decade or so before- a short enough period that writing wasn't necessary to communicate the lessons. Pizarro was physically present in the Americas at the time.
There's not actually any clear pathway from "have writing" -> "Atahualpa refuses to leave his army to meet with Pizarro". Writing did not make all European monarchs cautious and immune to ambushes or kidnapping; it is not the case that the Inca didn't understand the idea of deception.

In the linked thread, Daniel Kokotajlo suggests that the relevant difference was that the Spaniards had experience with more cultures than the Inca, and in particular were far more experienced with first contacts. This sounds plausible to me.

[-]johnswentworth5y80

johnswentworth is responsible for the talk, Jacob Lagerros and David Lambert edited the transcript

I don't think I can really claim that much credit for this one.

[-]Bird Concept5y20

Lol, fixed, thanks.

[-]Vaniver5y60

Anyway, the advantages were not god-like, in my opinion.

One way to think about this is that often people say "god-like" in the monotheistic sense of omnipotence. But classical humans had polytheistic gods (especially demigods) with sharply limited profiles of powers, many of which are met or exceeded by modern humans! That is, the standard you have to hit to become ruler looks more like the difference between regular humans and Perseus or Heracles, not the difference between regular humans and the God of the Old Testament.

[Like, it's not for nothing that the Aztecs told the Conquistadors that they thought the latter group were gods!]

The US military is currently looking into this. But a simple version could just be a camera hooked up to a gun and trigger so that when you activate it, it fires the bullet when it calculates that the bullet will actually hit the target.

This existed in 2013, at least according to a press release; similar claims of the military 'testing' them are still written in 2020. (The latter article notes that these systems have been available for tanks for a long time, but only recently have been miniaturized to the point that they make sense to include on rifles.)

There were likely attempts to conquer India that failed before eventually succeeding.

johnswentsworth earlier brings up Alexander the Great's attempt.

[-]Randaly5y80

[Like, it's not for nothing that the Aztecs told the Conquistadors that they thought the latter group were gods!]

It is unlikely that the Aztecs actually believed that the Conquistadors were gods. (No primary sources state this; the original source for the gods claim was Francisco Lopez de Gomara, writing based on interviews with conquistadors who returned to Spain decades later; his writing contains many other known inaccuracies.)

Claims that are related to, but distinct from, the Aztecs believing that the Conquistadors were gods:

The Aztecs, and other natives, plausibly believed or said that the Conquistadors were sent by God(s). This is likely because the conquistadors repeatedly and explicitly said that they had been sent by God.
There is substantially stronger evidence that the Aztecs said that they had long-awaited the return of their rightful rulers (implying that the Spanish were the rightful rulers.) Cortes, Bernal Diaz, and the Florentine Codex all agree that this occurred; however, it is impossible to say if it was meant literally.

[-]Daniel Kokotajlo5y40

This existed in 2013, at least according to a press release; similar claims of the military 'testing' them are still written in 2020. (The latter article notes that these systems have been available for tanks for a long time, but only recently have been miniaturized to the point that they make sense to include on rifles.)

Thanks for these examples. Are you suggesting this is evidence that this technology isn't going to be useful?

I read somewhere that India has been conquered 19 times, out of 21 attempts. Or something like that. Alexander was pretty far back in history and doesn't seem particularly relevant, I think the Turkish incursions into India just prior to the Portuguese might be worth looking at too. I do think it would be worth looking at great conquerors like Ghengis Khan, Alexander, Napoleon, etc. to see how much luck plays a role. There's some work that's been done on ranking generals by "Wins Above Replacement" which I'd like to look into.

re: Gods: Sure. I'm looking for more precise ways to put the point, too... maybe something about how many economic doubling times of progress is needed, or what the "on paper vs. reality multiplier" is. (On paper, prior to learning about the conquistadors, being presented with an inventory of all their assets vs. the tech level of the empires they attacked, I would have guessed that they could take on a force ten times their size, probably. But in reality they defeated empires four orders of magnitude bigger than them.)

[-]ESRogs5y20

For the "on paper vs reality" thing, I think a multiplier on population size might not be the right approach. If conquering some group helps you conquer others, then the right model might be more like an epidemiological one, or an evolutionary one that models the spread of genes throughout a population.

In other words, once the advantage you have crosses some threshold, your scope of conquest might be more dependent on the total size of population to be conquered than on the size of the advantage itself.

[-]ESRogs5y30

By analogy, why do the richest people in the world have tens of billions of dollars? Are they a million times smarter than the average person? A million times more hard working? A million times luckier? No. If you multiply all their advantages together do you get to a million? I don't think so.

What's actually going on is that they're enough better that they're able to stay at the top of some enterprise that, in an interconnected world, is able to grow to world scale. And so they're able to accumulate a small but non-negligible fraction of the world's wealth.

I predict that if the world was 1000 times bigger, the richest people would be roughly 1000x richer. (I could be convinced that it might scale super- or sub-linearly, but the main point is that if you wanted to predict the size of their wealth, the first thing you'd want to look at would be the size of the whole world, rather than the size of their absolute advantage to the median person.)

[-]Daniel Kokotajlo5y40

I completely agree with your point about models. So yeah, I guess my "on paper vs reality" idea is a non-starter.

[-]Pongo5y10

My naïve model is that within ~a generation, maintaining control of a newly conquered region is a net cost, or at least near zero

[-]Daniel Kokotajlo5y40

This seems wrong to me, can you explain?

[-]Pongo5y10

In my model, to retain control of a conquered area you must commit military forces for some time, and you are not much able to convert the conquered populace into additional military force.

This is not a very data-informed model though.

[-]Daniel Kokotajlo5y50

Ah, I see. Well, there have been many cases in history where the conquered populace was quickly converted into additional military force. For example, in all of the three conquistadors cases I've studied. Cortes' army was 98% native allies, even when he was still fighting to take over the aztecs, and immediately after beating the aztecs he launched new expeditions against neighboring empires, with his native armies. Same goes for Pizarro. Even Afonso had local forces assisting him militarily on many of his fights, and of course he used local forces to help police and garrison the cities and ports he conquered. And then of course the plunder gained from conquest can be used to fund more reinforcements and supplies for your own forces.

[-]Pongo5y10

Yeah, I’m confused about how quickly one can convert plunder into reinforcements. But I certainly update on the conversion of the conquered. Thanks!

[-]Randaly5y*110

I feel like there's two points causing the confusion:

(1) The assumption that natives are an undifferentiated mass. There were a variety of mutually hostile indigenous peoples, who themselves sough out allies against each other; and, in particular, who sought to balance the strongest local powers. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, page 48:

The search for native allies was one of the standard procedures or routines of Spanish conquest activity throughout the Americas. Pedro de Alvarado entered highland Guatemala in 1524 not only with thousands of Nahua allies, but also expecting to be able to take advantage of a Mexica-Tlaxcala type rivalry; the two major Maya groups of the region, the Cakchiquel and the Quiche, had both sent ambassadors to Mexico City a year of two earlier. As a result, for the rest of the decade, a brutal civil war ravaged the highlands as the Spaniards used these groups against each other and against smaller Maya groups, while periodically turning with violence upon these native "allies". Conversely, Spaniards under the Montejos sought desperately to make sense of regional politics in Yucatan in order to exploit or establish a similar division, being forced in the end to make a series of often unreliable alliances with local dynasties such as the Pech and Xio. These Maya noble families controlled relatively small portions of Yucatan, and the Spaniards never achieved control over the whole peninsula...
Manco's great siege of Cuzo in 1536 would probably have resulted in the elimination of Pizarro's forces were it not for his Andean allies. There were initially less than 1,000, but grew to over 4,000 later in the siege as two of Manco's brothers and other nobles of the same Inca faction came over to Pizarro's side...
The taking of native allies from one zone of conquest to the next was a practice established at the very onset of Spanish activity in the Americas. Caribbean islanders were routinely carried between islands as support personnel on conquest expeditions, and then brought to the mainland in the campaigns into Panama and Mexico. For example, Cortes brought 200 native Cubans with him to Mexico in 1519.

(2) This also neglects native power structures, which conquistadors mostly left intact in the years immediately after the conquest; note also that part of the conquered region had previously been conquered by the Aztecs, so there the Spanish were simply substituting one empire for another. The Spanish initially didn't speak the native languages, worked through local elites, and reused existing systems of tribute and corvee labor. The Spanish eventually exercised more direct control, but this took an extremely long time. (Fun fact: the last native rebellion against European control in Mexico ended in 1933).

(I am less familiar with India.)

[-]Pongo5y20

Thanks for sharing this data.

The lesson I draw from (1) is that in fact I should not think that conquering some areas help you conquer others. Rather, when entering some area, it is possible to draw local support in the first stages of a war. This updates me back towards thinking it's costly to control a newly conquered area.

The lesson I draw from (2) is that you can continue to make use of some of the state capacity of the native power structures. But it seems like you have fairly low fidelity control (at least in the language barrier case, and probably in all cases, because you lack a lot of connections to informal power structures). This seems like mostly a wash?

Are these the same as the lessons you draw from this data?

[-]Randaly5y30

(1) Local support doesn't end after the first stages of the war, or after the war ends. I mentioned having favored local elites within one society/ethnicity continue to do most of the direct work in (2); colonizers also set up some groups as favored identities who did much of the work of local governance. For example, after the Spanish conquest, the Tlaxcala had a favored status and better treatment.

(2) Not sure why you'd expect low fidelity control to imply that it ends up as a wash in terms of extracting resources, can you clarify?

[-]Pongo5y10

(2) It seems expensive to run a state (maintain power structures, keep institutions intact for future benefit, keep everything running well enough that the stuff that depends on other things running well keeps running). Increasing the cost by a large factor seems like it would reduce the net resources extracted.

It seems even more expensive if the native population will continue intermittently fighting you for 400 years (viz your rebellion fact)

[-]Daniel Kokotajlo5y70

Pongo, I think you are drawing the wrong lessons. Yeah, maintaining a state costs stuff. But there's no law that says it has to cost more than the benefits. In fact historically the "benefits" have almost always been greater than the costs. This is why empires tend to grow bigger. If ruling territory is usually a net cost, well, you'd never see any empires at all really, because no city would be wealthy enough to maintain more than a few small pieces of territory.

[-]Pongo5y10

That’s a good point!

Edit: I think my confusion is that there’s never been a whole world empire. Shouldn’t that happen if conquering a neighbouring region tends to make you more able to conquer other regions?

Alexander’s empire didn’t last. It seems like shortly after being founded, the Roman Empire has a lot of trouble and then (from my skim of Wikipedia) Diocletian sort of split it in four?

[-]Daniel Kokotajlo5y30

There's also never been someone with 100% of the money, even though getting money tends to make it easier to get more money. (For example, you can just invest it in an index fund!)

There definitely are ways in which maintaining an empire gets harder the bigger it gets. For example, communication is more difficult over longer distances and higher language barriers. Also, ingroup cohesion becomes harder to maintain when the outgroup is weaker and more distant. And there are of course special cases -- e.g. England for the Roman Empire -- where holding on to a piece of territory is more trouble than it's worth. Nevertheless it's still true that, in most cases, conquering something gives you more resources, military force, etc.

[-]johnswentworth5y50

I wrote some interesting speculation on this topic a few years ago. Roughly speaking, large premodern empires seem to consistently max out around roughly the same population size (~60M, with large-but-less-than-a-factor-of-two error bars). The few which manage to get larger than that through conquest rapidly split apart.

[-]Pattern5y20

How rapidly?

[-]johnswentworth5y40

One generation. The Mongols were the only empire to get a lot bigger than 50-70M (they capped around 110M), and they promptly split in a war of succession.

[-]Pongo5y10

There's also never been someone with 100% of the money, even though getting money tends to make it easier to get more money.

Oh yeah! What's up with that?

Nevertheless it's still true that, in most cases, conquering something gives you more resources, military force, etc.

Yeah, that seems to be true. My intuition is still having trouble with the success of converting the conquered military. Wikipedia tells me it was a big deal, and it remains surprising to me

[-]Randaly5y70

I don't really have a great answer to that, except that empirically in this specific case, Spain was indeed able to extract very large amounts of resources from America within a single generation. (The Spanish government directly spent very little on America; the flow of money was overwhelming towards Europe, to the point where it caused notable inflation in Spain and in Europe as a whole.) I don't disagree that running a state is expensive, but I don't see why the expense would necessarily be higher than the extracted resources?

[-]Pongo5y10

OK, so maybe the idea is "Conquered territory has reified net production across however long a period -> take all the net production and spend it on ships / horses / mercenaries"?

I expect that the administrative parts of states expand to be about as expensive as the resources they can get under their direct control. (Perhaps this is the dumb part, and ancient states regularly stored >90% of tax revenue as treasure?). Then, when you are making the state more expensive to run, you have less of a surplus. You also can't really make the state do something different than it was before if you have low fidelity control. The state doing what it was doing before probably wasn't helping you conquer more territory.