This is a linkpost for https://www.theverge.com/politics/773154/maga-tech-right-ai-natcon
As the guy most quoted in this Verge article, it's amusing to see so many LessWrong folks -- who normally pride themselves on their epistemic integrity and open-mindedness -- commenting with such overconfidence about my talk that they haven't actually read or seen, at a conference they've never been to, which is grounded in a set of conservative values and traditionalist world-views that they know less than nothing about.
I'll post the actual text of my talk in due course, after I can link to the NatCon video whenever it's released. (My actual talk covered AI X-risk and the game theory of the US/China arms race in some detail).
For the moment, I'll just say this: if we want to fight the pro-accelerationist guys who have a big influence on Trump at the moment, but who show total contempt for AI safety (e.g. David Sacks, Mark Andreessen), then we can do it effectively through the conservative influencers who are advocating for AI safety, an AI pause, AI regulation, and AI treaties.
The NatCons have substantial influence in Washington at the moment. If we actually care about AI safety more than we care about partisan politics or leftist virtue-signaling, it might be a good idea to engage with NatCons, learn about their views (with actual epistemic humility and curiosity), and find whatever common ground we can to fight against the reckless e/accs.
In related news, there's an article in Financial Times yesterday about the tensions within the conservative movement concerned AI safety, as manifest at the National Conservatism conference last week: https://www.ft.com/content/d6aac7f1-b955-4c76-a144-1fe8d909f70b
It's paywalled, and (unlike the AI industry) I don't want to violate their copyright by reposting the text, but the title is:
'Maga vs AI: Donald Trump’s Big Tech courtship risks a backlash
Silicon Valley’s sway in the White House is alarming populists in the president’s base'
A related post I wrote recently.
+1 to ChristianKl's observation below though that Geoffrey Miller is unrepresentative of MAGA because he's already part of the broader AI safety community.
Richard -- it's true that not many people in the AI safety community are MAGA supporters, and that not many MAGA supporters are in the AI safety community.
The question is, why? Many on the Left, especially those involved in tech, have the stereotype that MAGA supporters are simply too stupid to understand AI safety issues. As a result, they simply haven't bothered to reach out to the Right -- and they socially ostracize and exclude anyone who seems to be on the Right.
Would Anthropic be excited to hire an overt MAGA supporter to join their AI safety team -- however smart, competent, and committed they were? I doubt it.
Excerpts on AI:
Geoffrey Miller was handed the mic and started berating one of the panelists: Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, who is in charge of the company’s AI efforts.
“I argue that the AI industry shares virtually no ideological overlap with national conservatism,” Miller said, referring to the conference’s core ideology. Hours ago, Miller, a psychology professor at the University of New Mexico, had been on that stage for a panel called “AI and the American Soul,” calling for the populists to wage a literal holy war against artificial intelligence developers “as betrayers of our species, traitors to our nation, apostates to our faith, and threats to our kids.” Now, he stared right at the technologist who’d just given a speech arguing that tech founders were just as heroic as the Founding Fathers, who are sacred figures to the natcons. The AI industry was, he told Sankar, “by and large, globalist, secular, liberal, feminized transhumanists. They explicitly want mass unemployment, they plan for UBI-based communism, and they view the human species as a biological ‘bootloader,’ as they say, for artificial superintelligence.”
...
Their hostility varied wildly: some acknowledged that AI was not going away and could have some societal benefit if harnessed correctly, while others claimed that further AI development would lead to “civilizational suicide.” But nearly all the speakers expressed a deeply, emotionally entrenched suspicion against the tech industry.Even the threat of Chinese AI dominance was not enough to sway them, nor was the fact that Trump himself had signed off on funding projects like Stargate. “The state’s own rationale for AI acceleration is quite explicit about it: ‘We must beat China and grow the economy,’” said Michael Toscano, the director of the Family First Technology Initiative, during his Thursday talk. “These, of course, have significant implications for the future of Americans, but the message is one of a barren life: ‘To beat China, you must be willing to part ways with everything — including a happier future for your children and grandchildren.’”
...
The animus toward AI at NatCon was intense enough to prompt some formerly heretical ideas, such as joining forces with labor unions. “[They] have a long history of confronting technological change and should be treated as sources of experience and knowledge, rather than a historical dead weight force for anti-modernization,” argued Toscano at one point, adding that if Trump managed to bring the right wing and the unions together, “he would go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents, if not the man who saved the future.”
...
Unfortunately, by the end of NatCon, no one seemed to agree with Sankar. “Yes, artificial intelligence could have tremendous upsides,” Steve Bannon said during closing remarks. “But you’re looking into a bottomless pit. It’s a downside that nobody understands and nobody can articulate. And the last thing I want is a bunch of folks on the spectrum in Silicon Valley — who I’m not sure are even that dedicated to the United States of America, because they got these weird people talking about network systems and ‘we’re a network and not really a country’ — I don’t want them making decisions for the American people.”The crowd burst into applause.