Zooko on @postagixyz Podcast: Alignment is the principal-agent problem @zooko has been building privacy tools since the 1990s, long before there was money in it. @sreeramkannan and I had a conversation with him recently. It changed how I think about privacy altogether. His argument is that privacy is controlling disclosure. It comes from keeping your value private. Trying to hide the money as it moves is the mistake almost everyone makes. Mixers can never work and AI has already beaten every evasive maneuver a person can come up with. Then he turns the same lens on AI. He also says alignment is an old question. It is the principal-agent problem. Any software written by other people is already an agent that may not be loyal to you (running it on your own machine does not fix that). Lawyers owe their clients a duty of loyalty. He thinks the same rule should apply to AI. Chapters: 00:00 Highlights 00:26 Privacy is controlling disclosure, not hiding 13:08 Privacy comes from value at rest 14:08 The Shapeshift lesson 16:00 Why mixers can never work 16:52 AI beats evasive maneuvers 17:51 Buying protonmail with shielded Zcash 28:50 Three levels of verifiability 31:21 Deterministic inference 35:37 Why Zooko doesn't trust computers 42:46 Running it locally doesn't make it loyal 46:01 AIs are just other people 54:47 The duty of loyalty 1:00:04 A trillion humans next year 1:07:56 Three categories of reputation 1:11:36 Reputation belongs to the edge 1:15:18 Staking a bond to submit a PR