Cortés, Pizarro, and Afonso as Precedents for Takeover

Very interesting post! However, I have a big disagreement with your interpretation of why the European conquerors succeeded in America, and I think that it undermines much of your conclusion.

In your section titled "What explains these devastating takeovers?" you cite technology and strategic ability, but Old World diseases destroyed the communities in America before the European invaders arrived, most notably smallpox, but also measles, influenza, typhus and the bubonic plague. My reading of historians (from Charles Mann's book 1493, to Alfred W. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange and Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel) leads me to conclude that the historical consensus is that the reason for all of these takeovers was due to Old World diseases, and had relatively little to do with technology or strategy per se.

In Chapter 11 of Guns Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond analyzes the European takeovers in America you cite from the perspective of old World diseases (Here's a video from a Youtuber named CGP Grey who made a video on the same topic). The basic thesis is that Europeans had acquired immunity from these diseases, whereas people in America hadn't. From Wikipedia,

After first contacts with Europeans and Africans, some believe that the death of 90–95% of the native population of the New World was caused by Old World diseases.[43] It is suspected that smallpox was the chief culprit and responsible for killing nearly all of the native inhabitants of the Americas.

These diseases were endemic by the time that Cortes and Pizarro arrived on the continent, and therefore it seems very unlikely that their victory was achieved primarily from military and technological might. From Wikipedia again,

The Spanish Franciscan Motolinia left this description: "As the Indians did not know the remedy of the disease…they died in heaps, like bedbugs. In many places it happened that everyone in a house died and, as it was impossible to bury the great number of dead, they pulled down the houses over them so that their homes become their tombs."[46] On Cortés's return, he found the Aztec army’s chain of command in ruins. The soldiers who still lived were weak from the disease. Cortés then easily defeated the Aztecs and entered Tenochtitlán.[47] The Spaniards said that they could not walk through the streets without stepping on the bodies of smallpox victims

The effects of smallpox on Tahuantinsuyu (or the Inca empire) were even more devastating. Beginning in Colombia, smallpox spread rapidly before the Spanish invaders first arrived in the empire. The spread was probably aided by the efficient Inca road system. Within months, the disease had killed the Incan Emperor Huayna Capac, his successor, and most of the other leaders. Two of his surviving sons warred for power and, after a bloody and costly war, Atahualpa become the new emperor. As Atahualpa was returning to the capital Cuzco, Francisco Pizarro arrived and through a series of deceits captured the young leader and his best general. Within a few years smallpox claimed between 60% and 90% of the Inca population,[49] with other waves of European disease weakening them further.

The theory that disease was more important than technology is further supported empirically by the fact that Europeans were unable to conquer African tribes/civilizations until the late 19th century, long after the conquest of the New World, despite the fact that many African civilizations had similar or even lower technological capabilities compared to the Inca and Aztecs. The reason is because Africans had immunity to Old World diseases, unlike Americans. However, even in the 19th century conquests, historians often cite the development of the drug quinine, and thus immunity to disease, as one of the primary reasons why European civilizations were able to conquer African nations.

By contrast, I was only able to find one mention of smallpox in your entire post, and the place where you do mention it, you say

Smallpox sweeps through the land, killing many on all sides and causing general chaos.

If I'm reading "all sides" correctly, this is just flat-out incorrect. It killed mainly Americans.

At one point you state that during Pizarro's conquest,

The Inca empire is in the middle of a civil war and a devastating plague.

This "plague" was smallpox carried from earlier European travelers. Jared Diamond says

The reason for the civil war was that an epidemic of smallpox, spreading overland among South American Indians after its arrival with Spanish settlers in Panama and Colombia, had killed the Inca emperor Huayna Capac and most of his court around 1526, and then immediately killed his designated heir, Ninan Cuyuchi.

You may ask why there was an asymmetry: after all, didn't the New World have diseases that Europeans were not immune to? Yes, but basically only syphilis. Europeans had exposure to many infectious diseases because those diseases had been acquired from livestock, but livestock was not an important component of American civilizations in the pre-Columbian period.

One reason why disease might not be salient in descriptions of the American conquest is because until modern times, historians emphasized explanations of events in terms of human-factors, such as personalities of rulers and tendencies of groups of people. According to this source, it wasn't until the 1960s that historians started to take seriously the idea that disease was the primary culprit in the destruction of American civilizations.

There still could be an analogous situation where AI develops diseases that kills humans but not AI, but I think it's worth exploring this type of existential risk in its own category, and emphasize that this thesis does not depend on a historical precedent of conquerors having strategic or technological advantages.

Another example in this vein is Robert Clive's takeover of the Bengal Sultanate. As Nick Robins documents in The Corporation that Changed the World, Robert Clive was sent to Bengal by the British East India Company with the instruction to set up a modest trading outpost and specifically not engage in local politics or intrigue. So, of course, he intrigues with Mir Jafar, the commander in chief of the Nawab's army and gets him to change sides (along with a large portion of the Nawab's army) during the Battle of Plassey.

The East India Company's victory at the battle of Plassey resulted in immediate financial gain of £2,500,000 (now valued at over £250,000,000) for the Company, plus another £234,000 (now valued at £23,000,000) for Clive himself. Even more importantly, the EIC gained the right of diwani -- the right to collect taxes on behalf of the Mughals in Bengal. This allowed them to establish themselves as a commercial monopoly over the Bengal textile industry (considered the best in the world at that time) and further entrench themselves as a commercial and military power in India. For good reason, the Battle of Plassey is seen as a key moment in the consolidation of the British Empire in India, even though it was fought by a private individual on behalf of a private corporation.

Some more thoughts that came to me after I posted this:

1. I should have mentioned who I take myself to be responding to. I'm responding to claims I've heard made by various people (Katja Grace and Paul Christiano, to name two very smart examples) that I summarize as follows: "For one entity to take over the world, it needs more power than the rest of the world combined. That means it must either start out with a lot of power -- e.g. a major nation-state like China or USA -- or grow in power much faster than the rest of the world for a while. The latter possibility could happen if an intelligence explosion occurred in one local area, but this is unlikely; the intelligence explosion is more likely to be distributed fairly broadly."

2. I think these case studies are also historical precedents for "Treacherous Turns." Cortes and Pizarro were certainly very treacherous. (I don't think Afonso was, but I'd have to reread the stories.)

3. I have vague, conspiracy-theory-esque worries that actually the conquistadors really did just all get lucky, and that the explanation for this is some sort of anthropic selection effect. I don't think this is plausible though. But boy do they seem lucky when you read the stories.

4. Cortes, Pizarro, and Afonso all benefited from claiming to represent a powerful European state that would be sending more reinforcements soon. (In several cases this was blatant lying, e.g. Cortes was insubordinate and the reinforcements were out to arrest him!) Does this have an analogy in the AI case? I think it does, actually. An AI could claim that its recommendations are mutually beneficial and will seem obvious in retrospect and that future AIs we build will all say the same thing, so we either get along with this first AI or we resign ourselves to not making use of any AI in the future. (And it may actually be true that other AIs we build will say the same thing as the first AI, though not necessarily because its recommendations are mutually beneficial and obvious in retrospect!)

5. I overall am now fairly convinced that an AI which is generally more intelligent than us could take over the world, even if it isn't superintelligent. Even if it is to our best and brightest what our best and brightest are to our average folks -- which isn't that big of a difference -- I think it could take over the world. Or maybe a small group of such agents could do so. After all, I say: The difference between the conquistadors and their conquered victims is surely smaller than that.

(I am the author)

I still like & endorse this post. When I wrote it, I hadn't read more than the wiki articles on the subject. But then afterwards I went and read 3 books (written by historians) about it, and I think the original post held up very well to all this new info. In particular, the main critique the post got -- that disease was more important than I made it sound, in a way that undermined my conclusion -- seems to have been pretty wrong. (See e.g. this comment thread [LW · GW], these [LW(p) · GW(p)] follow [? · GW] up posts)

So, why does it matter? What contribution did this post make? Well, at the time -- and still now, though I think I've made a dent in the discourse -- quite a lot of people I respect (such as people at OpenPhil) seemed to think unaligned AGI would need god-like powers to be able to take over the world -- it would need to be stronger than the rest of the world combined! I think this is based on a flawed model of how takeover/conquest works, and history contains plenty of counterexamples to the model. The conquistadors are my favorite counterexample from my limited knowledge of history. (The flawed model goes by the name of "The China Argument," at least in my mind. You may have heard the argument before -- China is way more capable than the most capable human, yet it can't take over the world; therefore AGI will need to be way way more capable than the most powerful human to take over the world.)

Needless to say, this is a somewhat important crux, as illustrated by e.g. Joe Carlsmith's report [AF · GW], which assigns a mere 40% credence to unaligned APS-AI taking over the world even conditional on it escaping and seeking power and managing to cause at least a trillion dollars worth of damage.

(I've also gotten feedback from various people at OpenPhil saying that this post was helpful to them, so yay!)

I've since written a sequence of posts elaborating on this idea: Takeoff and Takeover in the Past and Future [? · GW]. Alas, I still haven't written the capstone posts in the sequence, the posts that'll tie it all together. I've got some new arguments and models to add too!

I think that if this post makes the review (and if it's allowed) I'll want to revise it as heavily as the rules allow, to include more analysis of the sort I've been doing in the sequence and plan to do in the future capstone post(s).

I think technological advantage - specifically sailing technology - probably played a much larger role in Afonso's takeover than it would seem from a quick read. Key pieces:

• Monsoons
• Lateen sail

Monsoons: wind around India blows consistently Southwest for half the year, and Northeast for the other half. IIRC from Braudel, this made trade in the Indian ocean highly predictable: everyone sailed with the wind at their back and ran consistent one-year circuits. As you mention:

The Indian Ocean contained most of the world's trade at the time, since it linked up the world's biggest and wealthiest regions.

I'd guess that the monsoons were probably a bigger factor here than vicinity to wealthy regions. In particular:

Europe is just coming out of the Middle Ages and does not have an obvious technological advantage over India or China or the Middle East, and has an obvious economic disadvantage.

Europe had less total wealth (because it had a smaller population) and was behind technologically in some ways (e.g. metallurgy), but even in the 15th-16th century Europe was considered "wealthy" on a per-capita basis. In particular, Europe had much more per-capita capital goods, even before the industrial revolution - especially mills and machinery. Braudel covers a lot of this.

Anyway, monsoons. Consistent wind direction, with an annual cycle. That makes the lateen sail a major strategic advantage: Portugese ships would have been able to tack upwind, a technique which was basically unheard of in the Indian ocean at the time. (On top of that, the Portugese were happy to sail in open ocean at that time and were accustomed to navigating away from land - unlike the Indian ocean locals. Again, Braudel talks about this a fair bit.) So the local navies were presumably stuck at one end of the ocean for six months, while the Portugese had free reign to sail around wherever they wanted. And to top it all off, even if the local navies did manage to catch them, the Portugese could just sail out to open ocean, and the locals wouldn't want to follow.

Now combine that with supply: throughout most of history, a single ship could carry as much supplies as about 4000 horses (source: Logistics of the Macedonian Army). For any island garrisons, or for garrisons surrounded by desert, horses wouldn't even be an option. Thus the importance of naval dominance even for land wars in premodern times: an overland supply train was extremely expensive at best, and often entirely infeasible. Control the water, and the enemy starved.

Put all that together, and Afonso's plan looks less ridiculously ambitious. They had a technological advantage which was perfectly suited to the problem.

Nice post. Were there any sources besides Wikipedia that you found especially helpful when researching this post?

However, I don't think this is the whole explanation. The technological advantage of the conquistadors was not overwhelming.

With regard to the Americas at least, I just happened to read this article by a professional military historian, who characterizes the Native American military technology as being "thousands of years behind their Old World agrarian counterparts", which sounds like the advantage was actually rather overwhelming.

There is a massive amount of literature to explain what is sometimes called ‘the Great Divergence‘ (a term I am going to use here as valuable shorthand) between Europe and the rest of the world between 1500 and 1800. Of all of this, most readers are likely only to be familiar with one work, J. Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), which is unfortunate because Diamond’s model of geographic determinism is actually not terribly well regarded in the debate (although, to be fair, it is still better than some of the truly trash nationalistic nonsense that gets produced on this topic). Diamond asks the Great Divergence question with perhaps the least interesting framing: “Why Europe and not the New World?” and so we might as well get that question out of the way first.

I am well aware that when EU4 was released, this particular question – and generally the relative power of New World societies as compared to Old World societies – was a point of ferocious debate among fans (particularly on Paradox’s own forums). What makes this actually a less central question (though still an important one) is that the answer is wildly overdetermined. That is to say, any of these causes – the germs, the steel (through less the guns; Diamond’s attention is on the wrong developments there), but also horses, ocean-going ships, and dense, cohesive, disciplined military formations would have been enough in isolation to give almost any complex agrarian Old-World society military advantages which were likely to prove overwhelming in the event. The ‘killer technologies’ that made the conquest of the New World possible were (apart from the ships) old technologies in much of Afroeurasia; a Roman legion or a Han Chinese army of some fifteen centuries earlier would have had many of the same advantages had they been able to surmount the logistical problem of actually getting there. In the face of the vast shear in military technology (though often not in other technologies) which put Native American armies thousands of years behind their Old World agrarian counterparts, it is hard not to conclude that whatever Afroeurasian society was the first to resolve the logistical barriers to putting an army in the New World was also very likely to conquer it.

(On these points, see J.F. Guilmartin, “The Cutting Edge: An Analysis of the Spanish Invasion and Overthrow of the Inca Empire, 1532-1539,” in Transatlantic Encounters: European and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, eds. K. J. Andrien and R. Adorno (1991) and W.E. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America: Firearms, Forts and Politics” in Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion and Warfare in the Early Modern World, eds. W.E. Lee (2011). Both provide a good sense of the scale of the ‘technological shear’ between old world and new world armies and in particular that the technologies which were transformative were often not new things like guns, but very old things, like pikes, horses and metal axes.)

With regard to the Indian Ocean, he writes:

the Portuguese cartaz-system (c. 1500-c. 1700) [was] the main way that the Portuguese and later European powers wrested control over trade in the Indian Ocean; it only worked because Portuguese warships were functionally unbeatable by anything else afloat in the region due to differences in local styles of shipbuilding).

I just listened to a podcast on the fall of the Inca. Two points stood out that seem relevant.

One is that the Inca themselves conquered the area through a combination of force and diplomacy. Not, I think, as thoroughly? Not sure how I'd operationalize that, and I'm not entirely sure why I think it deserves emphasis. Perhaps... this makes it clearer to me that in one more sense, the Spanish weren't "playing on easy mode"; the Inca rose to the top of the local power game, and then the Spanish beat them.

Another is that the Incan emperor wasn't entirely helpless. He pointed the Spanish at Cuzco because he already wanted it out of his way; he wanted to relocate the capital (and maybe already had done, as far as the people he commanded were concerned?) and was happy for the Spanish to destroy it. They didn't find his own capital (until much later?). In general he used his captivity to take out a lot of his political opponents, and was capable of sending and receiving messages through the people who went to fetch tribute. It went bad for him when his opponents convinced the Spanish he had an army coming to attack, and they executed him. Even if that hadn't happened, I'm not convinced he had a path to victory at that point, much less the Inca as a people. Seems relevant for the same reason as above (it's not like the emperor didn't know how to play the game). But there's also a point in favor of "if the Inca had had less internal strife, maybe things would have gone very differently for the Spanish".

(The same podcast (Fall of Civilizations, which in general I really like, caveat I don't have the background to speak to its accuracy) also had an episode on the fall of the Aztecs. I'd listened to it a few months before I first read this post, and didn't have any similar remarks at the time, though maybe I would have if it had been more fresh.)

Based on what I recall reading about Pizzaro's conquest, I feel you might be underestimating the importance of horses. It took centuries for European powers to figure out how to break a heavy cavalry charge with infantry; the amerindians didn't have the time to figure it out (see various battles where small cavalry forces routed thousands of troops). Once they had got more used to horses, later Inca forces (though much diminished) were more able to win open battles against the Spanish.

Maybe this was the problem for these empires: they were used to winning open battles, but were presented with a situation where only irregular warfare or siege defences could win. They reacted as an empire, when they should have been reacting as a recalcitrant province.

Here's what I'll be putting in the Alignment Newsletter about this piece. Let me know if you spot inaccuracies or lingering disagreement regarding the opinion section.

Summary:

This post lists three historical examples of how small human groups conquered large parts of the world, and shows how they are arguably precedents for AI takeover scenarios. The first two historical examples are the conquests of American civilizations by Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro in the early 16th century. The third example is the Portugese capture of key Indian Ocean trading ports, which happened at roughly the same time as the other conquests. Daniel argues that technological and strategic advantages were the likely causes of these European victories. However, since a European technological advantage was small in this period, we might expect that an AI coalition could similarly take over a large portion of the world, even without a large technological advantage.

Opinion:

In a comment [AF(p) · GW(p)], I dispute the claimed reasons for why Europeans conquered American civilizations. I think that a large body of historical literature supports the conclusion that American civilizations fell primarily because of their exposure to diseases which they lacked immunity to, rather than because of European military power. I also think that this helps explain why Portugal was "only" able to capture Indian Ocean trading ports during this time period, rather than whole civilizations. I think the primary insight here should instead be that pandemics can kill large groups of humans, and therefore it would be worth exploring the possibility that AI systems use pandemics as a mechanism to kill large numbers of biological humans.

Promoted to curated: I really like this post. I already linked to it two times, and it clearly grounds some examples that I've seen people use informally in AI Alignment discussions in a way that will hopefully create a common reference, and allow us to analyze this kind of argument in much more detail. 

There is a sci-fi sourcebook called 'GURPS Ogre' about an AI dominated future that follows a similar line of reasoning, I think OP might enjoy it, and pdfs can be found online.

I also think that the story of Napoleon's conquest and the reasons for its' success might also be informative to your thesis, as disease is not (at least as far as I know) nearly as much of a factor.

Another thought:

Japan was in a similar predicament in the mid-1850s, but successfully managed not only to survive but to thrive, modernizing their economy and military to Western levels without suffering regime change in the process.

What explains their success? It's not that the technological gap between them and Western powers was smaller than the technological gap between the conquistadors and their victims. (I think.) Rather, it's that there was no "diplomatic and strategic cunning" gap, and that was because there was no experience gap. Japan had been economically and militarily isolated from the rest of the world, but it had been watching developments around the world with keen interest via reports from the few Dutch and Chinese visitors it allowed into the Nagasaki port. For example, the Japanese government knew about Perry's expedition before it arrived, thanks to a tip from the Dutch. So when Perry arrived to force Japan open, the Japanese government was as well-informed as he was.

Fun fact: I predicted, after writing the above paragraph, that the Japanese emperor would not have gone anywhere near Perry for the negotiation. (Remember Cortes and Pizarro?) Sure enough, this was correct -- well actually the emperor was a figurehead at the time, but the man in charge stayed well away from the American visitors.

To be clear, I don't want to lean too heavily on this explanation. I think it's probably not even the main explanation; I wouldn't be surprised if more unity within Japan, or less rapaciousness within America at the time (or at least in Perry?), were bigger factors. I haven't done much reading on the topic. But I would bet that the lack of an experience gap played some role at least.

How significant do you think it was that the conquistadors had access to a deep historical archive? The Aztecs and Incas arguably had writing, but it wasn't used to preserve a large library of historical and fictional stories. The Portuguese presumably were reasonably educated, and knew many stories of emperors and empires. The South Americans may have had some oral histories to go by, but I presume it was paltry in comparison.

The Indian case was far different, I would imagine, so this hypothesis doesn't touch that case at all.

NEW EDIT: After reading three giant history books on the subject, I take back my previous edit. My original claims were correct.

Could you edit this comment to add which three books you're referring to?

In 1492, Iberian Christians had finally defeated the last remnant of the Moorish Empire that had subjugated most of their peninsula. The Reconquista. It was an enormous achievement against a powerful and advanced foe. [It also occasioned the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews, an act both odious and self-wounding.] Anyway, in the process of defeating the Moors, the Iberian Christian armed forces had become really really good at fighting. Brave unto reckless, for one thing. For another, they were able to count on a deep bench of sub-commanders and captains who saw -- and could exploit -- tactical opportunities much better than their less nimble Amerindian opponents. Rarely did one find a conquistador who could count on a noble inheritance. They were second, third, or fourth sons who thought -- correctly -- that the surest path to wealth and honor was military victory followed by severe repression of the defeated. Keep in mind that nobody in Europe could stand up to them either; it wasn't until the late 18th Century that other European nations could engage the Spaniards on equal terms.

You could even say that Cortez sparked more than 300 years of European domination. It wasn't until the Russo-Japanese War that the tables were turned. And that's another great story....

Related reading - https://mattlakeman.org/2020/06/25/polygamy-human-sacrifices-and-steel-why-the-aztecs-were-awesome/

spA.I.n

The "experience" and literacy ideas can draw a straight line to Hardcore History podcaster Dan Carlin's ideas on "intellectual contagion." In particular, how the working classes that comprised all armies in WWI began to throw off the idea that the aims of their monarchs or empires superseded their own well-being ... and how that affected the latter stages of the war.

Going further, 9/11 immediately ushered in an era of TSA, reinforced cockpit doors and air marshals that, one can argue, were already superfluous. Before the day's attacks were over, the passengers of Flight 93 proved that armed with the right info, the group will not tolerate the evil intent of the small force. Armored cockpit doors be damned, no one will ever take over a commercial airliner again with anything less than numbers great enough to overwhelm the rest of the passengers.

One more step to the present pandemic: While news and social media like to focus on the extremes, polling and a common sense (if anecdotal) look around reveals the vast middle are behaving cautiously, concerned for both the health of people and the economy, and mindful of recommendations from authoritative medical/governmental institutions.

While I enjoyed this read and was stimulated by it, I am not sure it reveals much of a pattern worth applying in any way to the present day. Human nature has not changed, and there is cause for wariness in that. At the same time, our ability to communicate, process and apply ideas has never been greater. Which is why, by almost every objective measure of human wellness, there has never been a better time to live on this planet.