Séb Krier#561
"The United States Must Reject Government Control of Artificial Intelligence"
a new @RSI essay outlining the 4 dangers of government attempts to nationalize AI firms. 👉
Many users objected to the R Street Institute urging rejection of US government AI control as a partisan stance taken only because Republicans hold the majority.
the full @RSI essay on dangers of AI nationalization is here. Summary follows below. https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/the-united-states-must-reject-government-control-of-artificial-intelligence/
Good piece by @profgoose addressing the redistributional politics of AI nationalization and the fight over how to divide the spoils.
All parties involved – Dems, White House, AI firms, special interests – have very different reasons for calling for wealth-sharing schemes, and even more contentious claims about how to best spend it all will follow. But the bottom line is that it all leads to greater control of the means of production by the state in the name of servicing various interests. It becomes about client politics and distributional favors with all the dangers that Mancur Olson, James Wilson, and many others warned of in the past.
A crucial insight here from Saunders with a useful analogy to petrostate politics:
“A country sitting on a giant claim to AI’s output starts to rhyme with a petrostate. […] A government that regulates these companies, buys from them, and now wants to own a piece of them is not a neutral steward of anyone’s dividend. It’s three conflicting interests wearing one hat, refereeing a game it’s also playing. We’ve run the regulator-and-customer version of this for eighty years with the defense contractors, and managed it, badly, with procurement rules and recusals. Adding owner to the same hat, over the same few firms that now sit at the center of the whole economy, is the new and unmanaged part.”
Importantly, Saunders makes another key point late in the piece about how we're getting way out ahead of ourselves here because "the whole conversation is running ahead of the evidence" in terms of the disruptive effects of AI systems. "The politics of the AI dividend is sprinting toward a crisis the economics hasn’t yet produced," he correctly notes.
Basically, all parties have essentially decided to buy into the idea of "Never let a good crisis go to waste" and then they have set out to create that crisis mentality even though there is no crisis at all! Everything being pitched today is just premised on Chicken Little conjectures that place zero faith in markets or humans to adapt to technological change, as they have many times before. https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/aipolitics-20-everyone-agrees-the
4⃣ AI nationalization is a serious threat to freedom of speech and expression
America should work to make AI a technology of freedom, not a technology of control.
"Centralized government control of AI would undermine the very forces that made America the world’s technological leader: competition, entrepreneurial experimentation, dynamism, and freedom of thought. AI socialism must be rejected to preserve our freedoms and ensure America stays on the cutting-edge of the most important technological revolution of modern times."
https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/the-united-states-must-reject-government-control-of-artificial-intelligence/
1⃣ AI nationalization would foreclose innovation and competition
2⃣ AI nationalization would lead to politicization and cronyism in tech markets
3⃣ AI nationalization would undermine America's global competitiveness / security
@AdamThierer @BexStreams @RSI They only say that while republicans have the majority
@AdamThierer @pat_hedger @RSI Military show own and control it. Or military. You know other counties will do the same.... I guess
@AdamThierer @RSI Bro wants an Arasaka and Militech
Séb Krier#561"The United States Must Reject Government Control of Artificial Intelligence"
a new @RSI essay outlining the 4 dangers of government attempts to nationalize AI firms. 👉