Here it is.
Over the past two years, the Biden administration struck a careful balance on artificial intelligence. The White House took steps to ensure the US stayed ahead of China in developing the technology while also trying to address some of AI’s many potential risks.
In his first 24 hours back in Washington, Donald Trump sent a different message to the AI community: Just build.
On Monday, Trump rescinded Biden’s sweeping executive order on AI. The move immediately halted the implementation of key safety and transparency requirements for AI developers. Some tech leaders attending the World Economic Forum in Davos praised his approach. Other experts warned against an AI world with fewer guardrails. Trump is expected to issue a new executive order on AI, but with a lighter touch.
On Tuesday, Trump announced a joint venture led by SoftBank Group Corp., OpenAI and Oracle Corp. that will fund billions of dollars worth of AI infrastructure. To unveil the project, Trump was joined by Softbank’s Masayoshi Son and tech executives including Sam Altman and Larry Ellison. The venture will deploy $100 billion “immediately,” Son said, with the goal of increasing to “at least” $500 billion in AI projects, including data centers and physical campuses. Son touted the joint venture as “the beginning of a golden age.”
This is classic populism. Most commentators confuse populism with popularity. In truth, political populism is a politician that appears to be of the people while in actually being for rich folks exploiting the people.
This AI investment fits the bill beautifully.
If AI delivers its promise, which is still a big “if”, the greatest casualties will be the working-class people fed up with wokism who voted for Trump.
This is because it will shred entry-level services and low-skilled white-collar jobs, including in such applications as transport.
Lower middle-class jobs are also at risk, perhaps even more so.
These are not new concerns, and many argue that technological revolutions of this nature create as many jobs as they displace. Perhaps.
More worrying is whether those who are displaced by Big AI, whatever form that takes, will even get to know why it is happening.
An amalgamation of Trumpian power with AI media creativity is a terrifying prospect for democracy. How will anybody be able to trust anything on the internet?
Perhaps printed newspapers will make a Luddite-inspired comeback!
More likely, the populist anti-woke counter-reformation will be entrenched, and nobody will have a clue what capital is up to.
However, there are probably more everyday considerations for many. As Joseph Conrad described so well, evil is banal, and the most likely outcome is the day-to-day exploitation of AI shortcuts by corporations.
For instance, I recently tried to pay my Telstra bill online. It refused to let me. Then it referred me to a third-party specialist for paying Telstra bills online for an advertised $1.
The service advised doing everything I had already done, so I quickly shifted the third party to a discussion about what service it was providing.
This then led to a chat about whether it was human or AI. It was AI, is my guess. But was convincing enough to be thought not so.
Spooked, I checked my credit card and found a $49 charge for effectively arguing the existential merits of AI, with an AI, about a Telstra bill neither would let me pay.
Ultimately, under El Trumpo’s freewheeling AI agenda, what we might get is not synthetic self-awareness, nuclear war with machines, and terminators.
Rather, we’ll get a reflection of ourselves and, in particular, El Trumpo.
Greed AI. A wave of super-dynamic robo-scammers and mechanistic middlemen that automates the very worst aspects of exploitative capitalism.
