A recent discussion post has compared the difficulty of an AI destroying modern human civilization to that of a modern human taking over the Roman Empire, with the implication that it is impossible.
The analogy has a few problems: first, modern humans don't have much greater raw intelligence than the Romans, only a bit more knowledge and tools; an AI would have a genuine intelligence advantage. Second, a high-tech civilization like ours offers many more ways for a genius to cause chaos than existed in classical Rome: it's more plausible that you can throw a few existing technologies together to create a superweapon than that Ptolemy could have done likewise, and there's no ancient Roman equivalent to hacking a nuclear launch system.
But taking over ancient Rome might serve as an interesting upper bound on the difficulty of an AI taking over modern civilization. And it's a theme of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that rationalists should be able to come up with creative solutions to seemingly hard problems. So if Professor Quirrell offered it as an extra credit assignment, how would you take over Rome?
Here are the rules:
- You are thrown back in time to the year 1 AD. You can choose to arrive anywhere in the world, but your method of arrival cannot itself give an advantage (you can't appear in a flash of light in the middle of a religious ritual or anything).
- You do not start with Roman citizenship or any other legal record of your existence.
- You keep your original physical characteristics, including sex, height, and fitness. You will appear in period-appropriate dress of your choosing, and can't carry any artifacts with you. You may start with enough money to live a patrician lifestyle for a year.
- You are intellectually near-perfect. You know all human knowledge as of 2012. You speak fluent Latin (and all other languages of the day) and can orate as eloquently as Cicero or Demosthenes. You are a tactical genius of the order of Caesar and Napoleon. And you have infinite willpower and goal-directedness: aside from human necessities like sleep or food, you need never rest.
- You win if you either become Roman Emperor (and are acknowledged as such by most Romans), or if a state you control conquers the city of Rome. You lose if you die, of old age or otherwise, before completing either goal.
Fair enough, but this doesn't eliminate the problem of Avaritus, it just pushes it toward a later stage, and makes him a bigger player (since, by the time you encounter him, you will be a bigger player).
You seem to be assuming, throughout this thread, that your knowledge is unique, and so are your plans. Other people might be able to steal it, or learn it from you, but they wouldn't be able to figure it out for themselves. In some cases, this is an entirely warranted assumption -- no one in Ancient Rome could even conceive of a vacuum tube -- but in other cases, the inferential distance is much shorter. Things like pulleys and fractional reserve banking are self-evident once they are deployed; they're kind of like HTML and "view source" that way. Transparency is inherent in the functionality.
And as for your long-term strategic plans... well, if you were Avaritus, and you learned of a freshly-minted Patrician who is generating massive wealth, hiring up a bunch of smiths, buying metal in bulk, and is engaged in secret military maneuvers -- what conclusion would you make from this ?
Remember that, while these Romans are (as specified in the scenario setup) dumber than you, they're not total idiots.
How will you accomplish this ? After all, you'll need to train your soldiers in the use of your weaponry. Wouldn't they all have to be in on the secret ? How many soldiers are you planning on training ? How will you guarantee their unshakeable loyalty and discretion ?
There are modern classes you can take on assembly line training. They take longer than two weeks, and they assume that the audience can read, write, and add, at the very least, which is more than I can say for your backwater Roman peasants. At this point, I'd like to see you produce some evidence that your two-week training period would be sufficient.
In addition, have you personally ever tried to construct something relatively simple, like the Giordani air rifle, in your garage in the modern world, using modern tools (other than, possibly, CNC) ? How long did it take you ?
Who death-watches the death-watchers ? In the rest of the paragraph, you discuss various methods for turning your plantation into a police state, but that type of thing makes your men even less loyal than they'd normally be, and becomes a full-time 24/7 endeavour after a while.
If I were Avaritus, I'd focus on stealing one of your assembled prototypes (remember, I know that you have them, I just don't know what they are). It would be easier than stealing your actual smiths, though that's an option, too.
At last we can agree on something; but then, why are you so focused on all the rotating death-watch guards ? Why bother keeping anything a secret at all ?
I used pistons and cylinders as a convenient example tolerances that matter. High-pressure valves in your pneumatics would be another example; even the feeding mechanism for your rifles would need to be fairly precise, in order to avoid jamming. But I do confess that I have trouble seeing how you'd use actual aeolipiles for industrial-grade applications; I was assuming that you were using the word to refer to the general class of heat engines, but maybe I was wrong.
Your financial, political, and military success is directly proportional to the number of enemies you end up making. As you build your empire, making the right kinds of enemies (weak, easily crushable ones) will become increasingly important. Priests are the wrong kinds of enemies.
Good. That means a stronger economy for me to work with. Especially since, if he were really my neighbor, I would very likely have a strong business relationship with him by then, providing fertilizer, transportation, and banking services for him. If he manages to steal a few of my technologies... GOOD. That makes him my ally. In all likelihood I would p... (read more)