I don’t think I really understood what it meant for establishment politics to be divisive until this past election.
As good as it feels to sit on the left and say “they want you to hate immigrants” or “they want you to hate queer people”, it seems similarly (although probably not equally?) true that the center left also has people they want you to hate (the religious, the rich, the slightly-more-successful-than-you, the ideologically-impure-who-once-said-a-bad-thing-on-the-internet).
But there’s also a deeper, structural sense in which it’s true.
Working on AIS, I’ve long hoped that we could form a coalition with all of the other people worried about AI, because a good deal of them just.. share (some version of) our concerns, and our most ambitious policy solutions (e.g. stopping development, mandating more robust interpretability and evals) could also solve a bunch of problems highlighted by the FATE community, the automation-concerned, etc etc.
Their positions also have the benefit of conforming to widely-held anxieties (‘I am worried AI will just be another tool of empire’, ‘I am worried I will lose my job for banal normie reasons that have nothing to do with civilizational robustness’, ‘I am worried AI’s will cheaply replace human labor and do a worse job, enshittifying everything in the developed world’). We could generally curry popular support and favor, without being dishonest, by looking at the Venn diagram of things we want and things they want (which would also help keep AI policy from sliding into partisanship, if such a thing is still possible, given the largely right-leaning associations of the AIS community*).
For the next four years, at the very least, I am forced to lay this hope aside. That the EO contained language in service of the FATE community was, in hindsight, very bad, and probably foreseeably so, given that even moderate Republicans like to score easy points on culture war bullshit. Probably it will be revoked, because language about bias made it an easy thing for Vance to call “far left”.
“This is ok because it will just be replaced.”
Given the current state of the game board, I don’t want to be losing any turns. We’ve already lost too many turns; setbacks are unacceptable.
“What if it gets replaced by something better?”
I envy your optimism. I’m also concerned about the same dynamic playing out in reverse; what if the new EO (or piece of legislation via whatever mechanism), like the old EO, contains some language that is (to us) beside the point, but nonetheless signals partisanship, and is retributively revoked or repealed by the next administration? This is why you don’t want AIS to be partisan; partisanship is dialectics without teleology.
Ok, so structurally divisive: establishment politics has made it ~impossible to form meaningful coalitions around issues other than absolute lightning rods (e.g. abortion, immigration; the ‘levers’ available to partisan hacks looking to gin up donations). It’s not just that they make you hate your neighbors, it’s that they make you behave as though you hate your neighbors, lest your policy proposals get painted with the broad red brush and summarily dismissed.
I think this is the kind of observation that leads many experienced people interested in AIS to work on things outside of AIS, but with an eye toward implications for AI (e.g. Critch, A Ray). You just have these lucid flashes of how stacked the deck really is, and set about digging the channel that is, compared to the existing channels, marginally more robust to reactionary dynamics (‘aligning the current of history with your aims’ is maybe a good image).
Hopefully undemocratic regulatory processes serve their function as a backdoor for the sensible, but it’s unclear how penetrating the partisanship will be over the next four years (and, of course, those at the top are promising that it will be Very Penetrating).
*I am somewhat ambivalent about how right-leaning AIS really is. Right-leaning compared to middle class Americans living in major metros? Probably. Tolerant of people with pretty far-right views? Sure, to a point. Right of the American center as defined in electoral politics (e.g. ‘Republican-voting’)? Usually not.
I don’t think I really understood what it meant for establishment politics to be divisive until this past election.
As good as it feels to sit on the left and say “they want you to hate immigrants” or “they want you to hate queer people”, it seems similarly (although probably not equally?) true that the center left also has people they want you to hate (the religious, the rich, the slightly-more-successful-than-you, the ideologically-impure-who-once-said-a-bad-thing-on-the-internet).
But there’s also a deeper, structural sense in which it’s true.
Working on AIS, I’ve long hoped that we could form a coalition with all of the other people worried about AI, because a good deal of them just.. share (some version of) our concerns, and our most ambitious policy solutions (e.g. stopping development, mandating more robust interpretability and evals) could also solve a bunch of problems highlighted by the FATE community, the automation-concerned, etc etc.
Their positions also have the benefit of conforming to widely-held anxieties (‘I am worried AI will just be another tool of empire’, ‘I am worried I will lose my job for banal normie reasons that have nothing to do with civilizational robustness’, ‘I am worried AI’s will cheaply replace human labor and do a worse job, enshittifying everything in the developed world’). We could generally curry popular support and favor, without being dishonest, by looking at the Venn diagram of things we want and things they want (which would also help keep AI policy from sliding into partisanship, if such a thing is still possible, given the largely right-leaning associations of the AIS community*).
For the next four years, at the very least, I am forced to lay this hope aside. That the EO contained language in service of the FATE community was, in hindsight, very bad, and probably foreseeably so, given that even moderate Republicans like to score easy points on culture war bullshit. Probably it will be revoked, because language about bias made it an easy thing for Vance to call “far left”.
“This is ok because it will just be replaced.”
Given the current state of the game board, I don’t want to be losing any turns. We’ve already lost too many turns; setbacks are unacceptable.
“What if it gets replaced by something better?”
I envy your optimism. I’m also concerned about the same dynamic playing out in reverse; what if the new EO (or piece of legislation via whatever mechanism), like the old EO, contains some language that is (to us) beside the point, but nonetheless signals partisanship, and is retributively revoked or repealed by the next administration? This is why you don’t want AIS to be partisan; partisanship is dialectics without teleology.
Ok, so structurally divisive: establishment politics has made it ~impossible to form meaningful coalitions around issues other than absolute lightning rods (e.g. abortion, immigration; the ‘levers’ available to partisan hacks looking to gin up donations). It’s not just that they make you hate your neighbors, it’s that they make you behave as though you hate your neighbors, lest your policy proposals get painted with the broad red brush and summarily dismissed.
I think this is the kind of observation that leads many experienced people interested in AIS to work on things outside of AIS, but with an eye toward implications for AI (e.g. Critch, A Ray). You just have these lucid flashes of how stacked the deck really is, and set about digging the channel that is, compared to the existing channels, marginally more robust to reactionary dynamics (‘aligning the current of history with your aims’ is maybe a good image).
Hopefully undemocratic regulatory processes serve their function as a backdoor for the sensible, but it’s unclear how penetrating the partisanship will be over the next four years (and, of course, those at the top are promising that it will be Very Penetrating).
*I am somewhat ambivalent about how right-leaning AIS really is. Right-leaning compared to middle class Americans living in major metros? Probably. Tolerant of people with pretty far-right views? Sure, to a point. Right of the American center as defined in electoral politics (e.g. ‘Republican-voting’)? Usually not.