AI and partisan politics

[jon-nyc]

AI still hasn’t gained a foothold in partisan politics. You see some nervousness about jobs, deep fakes, etc on left and right, but it still seems in the background politically.

Seems like this can’t last much longer. Maybe some newsworthy event will bring it to the forefront, whether that’s a model leagues more powerful than any before it, or some high profile layoffs directly associated with an AI implementation. Or maybe progress with manipulating atoms not just bits. Whatever it is we’ll see it before 28 I suspect.

Thoughts?

[LuFins Dad]

Trump’s been pretty pro-AI as a basis for domestic economic growth, and not received any pushback politically. I think it’s one of those things that everyone recognizes as inevitable, recognizes job losses as being inevitable, but also realize the tremendous opportunities that it could provide. Ultimately, though, it’s a security issue. The US can be at the forefront, or China takes the lead, and ultimately pushes the US into irrelevance.

It’s the new space race, even if we are concerned about winning.

[jon-nyc]

I agree with everything you wrote and I still think it will come to the forefront of politics in a couple years at most.

[Horace]

Stopping technology has never been a popular position, and I don't expect either party to adopt any such position.

There will be political issues around special taxes on AI productivity, I guess.

[jon-nyc]

In the past technology generally threatened workers in one industry while providing benefits to everyone else. I’m not sure we’ve had a single technology that threatened so many jobs across so many industries before.

Also it’s not clear to me that the average Joe sees its benefits.

So I can imagine a broader resistance to it than we’ve seen in the past.