Dwarkesh Patel
Hosts the Dwarkesh Podcast, a long-form interview show on AI progress, timelines, and the people building frontier models, along with economists and historians.
“If you wanted to transform the world of the 18th century, you might care about how well you can navigate Westminster. But another thing you might care about is: can you just immediately start building steamships and the Telegraph and the Maxim gun? That alone would make you a super transformative force in the 18th century — you don't necessarily need to be amazing at convincing King Henry of some bullshit.”
Dwarkesh Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · August 2026
Restating Ryan Greenblatt's argument in his own terms: that an AI good enough at R&D could reshape the world without being persuasive, political or socially skilled at all. The analogy separates two things usually bundled together in discussions of AI power — technological capability and the ability to work institutions. Greenblatt agrees this is basically right.
Transcript
So the thing you're pointing out is that, okay, there probably will be this transfer outside of these environments to maneuvering around in courtrooms and the halls of Congress and business. Business board rooms.
Given some effort to improve the transfer and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But even if there's not, what you're suggesting is: look, if you wanted to transform the world of the 18th century, you might care about like how well you can navigate Westminster or something. But another thing you might care about is like, can you just immediately start building steamships and fucking like building Telegraph and the Maxim gun and whatever. And that alone would be like, if you could get really good at that, you could be a fucking super transformative thing in the 18th century. You don't necessarily need to be amazing at trying to convince King Henry of some bullshit. I'm so fucking up my medieval history. I'm guessing Henry was not king at this time. But anyway, so that's your point. Yeah. And so you're suggesting that at this time, you know, the AI companies are also working on robotics progress, which is very commingled with AI research progress. And so if you can build more robots, if those robots have better AIs operating them that are human level, like human-level teleoperation is actually pretty good on robots, but we just don't have human-level AIs and AI robotics models react. So you're suggesting if we do that, if the AIs get really good at the verification…
Yeah, that's basically right. Like, I think my perspective is like, if AIs are sufficiently good at RD, including hardware, RD, robots, whatever, then they can radically transform the world, even if they're not that good at playing politics. And also, we're in a pretty dangerous situation because…
AI is great at writing software because it's easy to generate synthetic leaf code problems and RL on them. But AI is bad at more complex engineering. Things like choosing the right system architecture, because no signal tells you what design choices will prevent an outage months down the road. AIs…
Something like that.
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