An insight into the pungent politics of endangering humanity

We live involuntarily in the same world with the ostentatiously vocal tech bros; it's not hard to think they often come off as more like shallow teenage boys than humanly useful geniuses. But amid the real world noise about Artificial Intelligence, it's worth teasing out exactly what some of them are doing in our ordinary politics.

The always annoying but frequently insightful Matt Yglesias reports on some grubby real world machinations in the AI business. Many workers and some tech barons are warning there should be more regulation -- but as always, the devil is in the details.

... [the company] OpenAI’s official position in its communications to its employees is that OpenAI is not behind the anti-regulation super PAC Leading the Future.

But nobody working professionally in American politics believes this.

Leading the Future is funded in large part by OpenAI’s President Greg Brockman and his wife. It was conceptualized, by all accounts, by Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer... Unfortunately, his expertise in helping tech companies win regulatory fights in blue states — an endeavor I normally support — is in this particular case gravely endangering humanity.

Leading the Future has dumped huge amounts of money into primaries to try to defeat candidates who advocate for A.I. safety regulation. More than that, though, it’s trying to chill the whole topic. It exists not so much to spend money in the midterms as to convey to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer something like “nice anti-Trump thermostatic backlash you’ve got there … would be a shame if hundreds of millions of dollars came off the sidelines to be used against all your frontliners because party leaders embraced A.I. safety.”

So, again, if you work at OpenAI and believe that collective action is needed to address this problem, you have to understand that your company’s executives are massive stumbling blocks. 

Putting out fake statements distancing the company from Leading the Future is worse than doing nothing. You and your colleagues need to work together to demand that the company cease and desist from this effort to chill federal regulation. If the company won’t do it, you need to walk.

By contrast, while I would never in a million years say that [the AI company]Anthropic’s conduct as a company is beyond reproach or above suspicion — that’s the whole reason we need actual regulation here and not just to root for the “good guys” to win the race — their political conduct is consistent with the view that collective action is desirable.

Yglesias makes some prescriptions for reining in the many dangers that may be arising from the AI our tech barons are racing to build. I don't know if he is really onto something. But I do know that understanding the entanglement of the tech moguls with very conventional US political incentives has to be a big part of curbing the worst potentials of AI.