If this doesn’t chill you, I don’t know what will. 😱
“A president with the authority that Trump is now asserting could in theory put the world’s most powerful AI to repressive ends while at the same time keeping it off the market and out of the hands of rival power centers.”
Over the past few weeks, President Trump has accomplished what you might call a time-release power grab. He has asserted a kind of authority over the dissemination of large language models that, as AI gets more and more capable, will make it easier for presidents to abuse their power. And, given the rate at which AI capabilities are growing, it’s not impossible that Trump will, during his remaining time in office, get a chance to demonstrate this fact.
The good news: I doubt that, even if Trump does get this chance, the 2.5-year constitutional limit on his tenure will be exceeded. But you never know…
Much of the dynamic I’m talking about is captured in this sentence from a Washington Post op-ed that I wrote last week (before events that, as I’ll explain, gave Trump’s power grab de facto validation): “A president with the authority that Trump is now asserting could in theory put the world’s most powerful AI to repressive ends while at the same time keeping it off the market and out of the hands of rival power centers.”
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