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.”
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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.’”
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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.”
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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.
Thanks for sharing this.
IMHO, if EAs really want effective AI regulation & treaties, and a reduction in ASI extinction risk, we need to engage more with conservatives, including those currently in power in Washington. And we need to do so using the language and values that appeal to conservatives.