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| ▲ | tavavex 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Maybe it's not a full and clean correlation, but there still is one. In my experience, AI boosterism is often linked to conservatism, because the current US administration is all in on AI, the spoils of AI disproportionately reward the rich and increase inequality, and because leaving AI labs alone is fully consistent with most conservatives not wanting to bother private business and letting them do what they want. | | |
| ▲ | anon373839 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | The thing with AI is there are multiple axes of division that are in tension, and they don’t map conveniently to standard politics. For example, Anthropic in one sense seems to occupy a caricature of the nanny state worldview, with their constant calls for safety regulation. But then when you examine the motives, it becomes pretty clear that giving them what they ask for will give them unprecedented consolidation of economic power. So if you are a liberal normally inclined toward regulation, you have to consider: is it worth living in a world with even more trillionaires controlling an even larger share of the world’s resources? Or would it be better for AI to become fully commoditized so that its benefits are more broadly dispersed? Or suppose you are right wing, free market capitalist, deeply nationalist person. Are you for or against Chinese AI models? Your desire for America to “win” AI may be tempered by knowing that the biggest winners will be some power-mad EA people in the SF Bay. Judging from social media interactions, this space seems to make for strange bedfellows at times. | | |
| ▲ | tavavex 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | My counterpoint to that first one is that forcing outcomes through laws doesn't have a political side, although the discourse in the US has definitely been extremely mangled by the untrue stereotype that conservatives are less keen on passing legislation. Strong government force can be used to either pass real regulation or to create and protect monopolies. Anthropic is asking for the latter. None of the AI labs would ever willingly ask for the lid to be put on their pot, it's just everyone else. Their demands are just requests for a government-protected monopoly that are PR-worded to appear as regulation. Left-leaning people are usually proponents of real regulation, the kind that businesses would never ask to be imposed on them. Right-leaning people may side with the AI labs more, seeing their proposals as compromise or reading between the lines and supporting the regulation to ensure that their side wins and that the biggest labs are handily rewarded for their work. The Chinese model split is more interesting, but only as a theoretical point that examines what different political sides would support in theory if everyone's ideology was fully consistent with itself. If you look at the people, in reality most conservatives seem to side with laws that would protect their own and ban other models to 'win'. Left-leaning people are more likely to be okay with Chinese models or open-source AI, seeing them as opportunities to dislodge the power of American AI labs and prevent too much power from concentrating in few hands. So I think the correlation is still valid. There are a few people on all sides who may take an unexpected worldview in light of these new problems, but I think that for most people, what I outlined is more or less the way they've split up. |
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