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Roundup #88: Is it time to panic yet?
AI risk; AI and growth; AI and Saas; Rich people; Christians vs. Nazis; Japanese culture; State capacity; City size
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This week’s roundup has a lot of AI in it. Fortunately or unfortunately, it seems like a lot of the news is going to revolve around AI for the rest of our lives. That was true of industrial technology in 1870-1970; people basically got used to the idea that railroads and factories and oil and industrialized warfare and such matters were central to the way the world was run and to the collective future of humanity. AI is going to be like that going forward, and we’re just going to have to get used to that. So let’s make it as fun and interesting as we can!
1. Americans are getting scared about AI risk
AI risk has exploded onto the national scene. AI companies and AI researchers generally believe that the technology they’re building has the capacity to do great harm — perhaps even to end the human race — if it’s not developed more slowly and deliberately. There are five main groups of people opposing the slowdown:
The Trump administration, which is worried that an AI slowdown might also slow down economic growth
Investors who think a slowdown might hurt their bottom line
Libertarians and techno-optimists who think regulating technological progress is bad on principle
China hawks who worry that a slowdown would let China take the lead in the AI race
Progressives who spent the last few years telling themselves that AI doesn’t work, that AI is a huge economic bubble, and so on, and who now can’t bring themselves to admit that yes, the techbros actually built something that works.
This is a strange alliance indeed. The last of these — the progressives who simply couldn’t admit that billionaire-funded private industry could build something powerful enough to endanger humanity — were the strangest of all, since their refusal to acknowledge the effectiveness of AI basically put them in an alliance with libertarians, hawks, and Trump. In fact, in recent days there has been a tremendous civil war within the progressive movement between the “AI is dangerous” and “AI is fake” camps, with Bernie Sanders supporting the former and his former comms director David Sirota supporting the latter.
But although it has the support of the president (for now), the anti-slowdown coalition is losing in the court of public opinion. Nate Silver has a post rounding up the evidence:
A bipartisan majority is now worried about existential risk from AI:
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And a bipartisan majority thinks AI is moving too fast:
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Barack Obama, probably the most successful American politician of this century so far, is