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Roughly 3 years ago, specifically in December 2023, I've reiterated my longstanding prediction that «the culture war's most important front will be about AI», and specifically AI accelerationism vs anti-AI/AI safety movement:
And the following political compass:
Seems like this was too much complexity for big tent politics in the US, at least so far; and the Trumpian State sees no use for the EA network, and instead (pretty rationally) perceives it as an uncontrollable alternative center of power. Instead we have, essentially, anti-AI left + pro-AI right (with some notable exceptions – eg. Steve Bannon, apparently, has been anti-China specifically because of his concern about Chinese AI progress, and now joins hands with Bernie Sanders). I've also failed to predict the salience and extent of Chinese open source dominance, as well as the bizarre datacenter water use backlash (charitably, can be shoehorned as Luddism?). Nevertheless, we've «succeeded» at the core task of making this a culture war front. The degree of (unnecessary) politicization of the issue is incredible. Trump is doing the yeoman's work, lumping it in with random Blue-coded ideas he disapproves of “Global “Warming,” where everyone was going to be dead by now, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, or Impeachment Hoax #1, or Impeachment Hoax #2.”. Jensen Huang enjoys his role as the kingmaker who has the King's ear. Sam Altman is opportunistic as usual but, after recent incidents, is genuinely spooked about AI risks (I have it on good authority that OpenAI really intends to slow down some internal projects specifically to bolster their oversight). The quasi-Masonic part is shaping up nicely, too – Dario Amodei, who's become the poster boy of Woke Left AI, promotes Embedded Evaluators with the central example being METR, very deeply connected to Anthropic and the broader EA scene. The EA itself is more explicitly Left-aligned now, despite efforts of some to paint them as TESCREAL eugenicists (the woke cancellation of Bostrom in Jan 2023 was the canary in the coal mine, Yudkowsky laments the missed opportunity of bipartisanship). There are clearly politically coded reports on prominent doomers.
This is all a bit meandering. What I want to know: how do you see this going further? We aren't anywhere close to the wall of capabilities; there are no walls in sight. Anthropic and OpenAI are holding back already, but their products will keep getting better, and fast. Google will make a comeback at some point (maybe in a couple weeks), xAI and Meta may catch up too. In my book, we (well, they) have practical superintelligence that's sufficient for both unprecedented productivity acceleration and really devastating, nation-crippling cyberattacks, which I guess will be discussed with Xi soon. At this rate, in a few months the level of capability Fable 5.1 or GPT 6 Astra will be mostly commodified and uploaded to HuggingFace (owned by Nvidia now). And those are relatively weak systems compared to internal models, which can build models that are vastly stronger still, without even any R&D breakthroughs, just by virtue of synthesizing stronger data trajectories and designing better RL environments. Superintelligence, in other words, is baked in. By Q1 2027 we'll see a jump from Astra that's at least as big as Sol => Astra. I fail to understand how that won't steamroll companies trying to build their moats on products downstream of frontier AI, labs need every bit of revenue to cover their costs, which will only increase due to growing self-imposed safety requirements; employers outside the AI sphere will also be increasingly feeling the heat. There's a whole ugly dimension of circular financing, too.
Americans as a whole are pretty pessimistic about AI even at these mediocre levels of diffusion (I am skeptical of this data that purports to demonstrate much lower adoption than in China, Americans are probably lying more due to widespread negativity on AI, but in any case AI isn't currently doing most of their jobs). Astra+ level models with very low error rate and 300 tok/s output totally can replace most knowledge workers. On the other hand, it seems that so far AI has not caused anything like mass unemployment, and perhaps economists have a point about comparative advantage, so that'll reduce the intensity of class dynamics.
Democrats are likely to sweep both chambers of Congress, which I guess is what Dario is hoping for and why he feels emboldened to antagonize Trump&Hegseth. Nevertheless, the needs of national security and GDP-maxxing (as well as the Executive's will) should prevent any nontrivial exogenous industry slowdown. So by default we'll see further crystallization of Red Accelerationism vs Blue Decelism, and as AI becomes more undeniably scary, that may begin to eat into the Red political base. It'll be interesting to watch, but I'm really uncertain as to how it'll go.
Both
(Why are state/intelligence actors top left, and the MIC top right? Just being foreign should not make them change the quadrant?)
and especially
feels like it is lumping a lot of different groups together which have very little in common.
I can of course define arbitrary groups, like "people who sometimes kill young mammals", and then lump in various groups like doctors who perform abortions, butchers, school shooters, pharmacy labs, some psychotic mothers, the US military, drivers accidentally running over hedgehogs at night, ratcatchers, sport hunters, indigenous hunters, cannibals, owners of oil drilling rigs, MAID activists, evil cults doing child sacrifice, measles activists, people practicing infanticide for population control, carnivorous animals.
The problem is that young-mammal-killing is just a surface-level similarity between all of these, not some deeper moral belief. MAID activists are not especially pro school shootings, nor are butchers especially likely to be pro measles, or cannibals pro animal testing.
Sometimes necessity makes strange bedfellows, and you get broad coalitions like the WW2 Allies. And it is always tempting to lump all of your enemies together for propaganda reasons. The communist Jewish Yankee pacifist union ethno-nationalist gay gypsy democratic enemies of the Reich.
So far, I see very little evidence that the AI x-risk crowd and the people who are against AI-generated art or Grok undressing kids or AI causing job loss will converge on a common strategy (like Butlerian) jihad any more than that the killers of young mammals will converge on a particular mode of mammal-killing.
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