Whose Values Does Your AI Run On?

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ABOUT THIS EPISODE

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Every AI agent your organisation deploys carries a values rulebook that somebody wrote. Usually a handful of researchers, at a Bay Area frontier lab. That is not a governance decision your board consciously made — it is the default your vendors chose for you.

Dr Craig A. Kaplan — PhD with Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, founder of Predict Wall Street, and designer of the Democratic AI architecture free at SuperIntelligence.com — spent the last five years arguing this is the biggest architecture problem in AI safety, and that the industry is solving it the wrong way.

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CHAPTERS

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00:00 Cold open — the AI that destroyed its operator

00:54 What this episode is about

02:20 Working with Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon

04:50 When your phone hides your emails from you

11:29 Anthropic's Constitutional AI — a benign autocracy?

16:36 Guardrails, Project Glasswing, community-level safety

27:21 The hedge fund that beat Wall Street with the crowd

34:15 Wisdom AND madness of crowds — the AI amplifier

41:57 Democratic AI — the architecture nobody is building

48:39 When your AI meets my AI — the arbitration problem

52:32 HAL 9000 is the warning, not the prediction

1:00:52 The US Air Force AI that destroyed its operator

1:06:07 The 1956 AI that fooled Bertrand Russell

1:11:35 Bounded rationality vs the AGI marketing problem

1:15:35 Craig Kaplan's predictive judgement

1:19:49 The Bottom Line — for CISOs, boards, procurement

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READ + WATCH

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Full written analysis on Substack: thecontrollayer.arkava.ai/kaplan-values-podcast

YouTube video version: youtu.be/8F9sr21ELpg

Subscribe to The Control Layer — weekly, free: link.arkava.ai/join

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SOURCES CITED IN THIS EPISODE

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- Anthropic Constitutional AI — anthropic.com

- Predict Wall Street / iQ Company published figures — iqco.com/about

- Democratic AI architecture (Kaplan) — superintelligence.com

- Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, Logic Theorist (1956) and Human Problem Solving (1972)

- Herbert Simon: Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1978), Turing Award (1975) — the only person in history to hold both

- Geoffrey Hinton public statements on p(doom)

- US Air Force AI simulation account (Col. Tucker Hamilton, Royal Aeronautical Society, May 2023, later clarified by USAF as a thought experiment)

- Isaac Asimov, Three Laws of Robotics (1942)

- Meta "personal superintelligence" strategy (Zuckerberg, July 2025)

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GUEST

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Dr Craig A. Kaplan

Founder, iQ Company (est. 1993)

Founder, Predict Wall Street (est. 2005)

Managing Director, SuperIntelligence.com and iQ Studios

PhD, Carnegie Mellon University — supervised by Herbert A. Simon

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HOST

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Amer Altaf

Founder & CEO, Arkava

Managing Editor, The Control Layer

arkava.ai · Trusted Intelligence, Tangible Impact

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ABOUT THE CONTROL LAYER

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The Control Layer is the publication and podcast on how AI, cybersecurity, sovereignty, technology and geopolitics are reshaping who controls the next decade. Every episode closes on a falsifiable predictive judgement from the guest — logged on our public predictions tracker. We come back to test each one publicly on the date named.

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FOLLOW

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Substack: thecontrollayer.arkava.ai

YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCLBj_B4T8M4LfgRAMs6VgWA

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