I am writing this on a plane back to Washington, DC, from a conference in the Bay area, the land of tomorrow. While the conference was not about ia, this is the area of the bay, and therefore, approximately 90 percent of the conversations were about Ia.
It is difficult to exaggerate the scale of the gap between the cultures of the Bay and DC area on this subject. The AI has certainly become a real part of the policy conversation in DC, but only in quite technical, short -term and non -spicy high profile ways: how should we regulate deep falsifications? How should we handle the growing energy demands of data centers? Should we require NVIDIA processors to have a small component that can say that the chip is physically in China to prevent Beijing from having their hands in their hands?
But if DC AI groups are everyday, the bay area are existential.
In Berkeley, or at least among the crowd with which I was talking, the questions were more like: Can we ever prevent machines from deceiving our attempts to evaluate ourselves, to blackmail us when it is a mesh taco? (All these are real things that researchers have found that avant -garde models can do). If we do not solve these problems, will we survive in the next 10 years?
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When they are somewhat less apocalyptic such as “how will we fix them if billions of people are unemployed lagitably due to AI and the progress of robotics”, the tone of most of the response that I obtained Alle Turath from the great and discouragement of the greatly and discouragement. He survived. “
Temperamentally, I am more inclined to think about these things in a very specific way and short term. There is a reason why I live in Washington, DC; It is a city for good character increases. Then, naturally, the whole AI speaks to me thinking about the huge bill of budget reconciliation approved by the Chamber and being a consultant by the Senate.
Let me be overwhelming: this is, in a large and small way, not a budget that is taken seriously. Worse, if you think this technology will have an equally slightly significant influence on the world in the next decade, the great bill that will make that influence worse.
Things directly related to AI
There is a section of the bill that is directly about the AI, which is the moratorium proposed in most state -level attempts to regulate AI over the next 10 years. Originally, this was an absolute prohibition, but Becare of the limits on what the reconciliation law projects can do in non -Budgetary affairs and try to regulate regulation is clearly non -Budgetary, now it takes the form of a requirement that states abstract.
There are reasonable arguments that the policy of AI should eat at the federal level, instead of state. But this is not a case in which the federal government has a well reasoned policy frame that Ites seeks to impose instead of the policies of the states. This is a case in which the federal government moves to eliminate or prevent state regulations and replace them with Nothing at all.
It is not surprising that corporate interests such as the Andrees Horowitz Risk Fund are increasing their DC lobbying effort in the middle of this fight. AI will change our lives quite fast. The public already suspects this and wants regulation, demands that are only created as the short -term economic and labor effects of AI become palpable. The only way for the industry to avoid this is to block a Laissez-Faire regime at this time. If you believe that there is even the possibility that systems can cause serious problems worthy of regulation, this is a very dangerous disposition. Grateful, even quite conservative Republicans in both cameras seem to realize this, and hopefully that reaction kills the disposition.
Almost relevant to the industry are the provisions that reduce the subsidies for the development of clean energy. The training and deployment of AI requires many very expectations -filled data centers that must operate 24/7 to pay their immense cost in advance. These centers need equally reliable power sources, 24/7. Identally, that comes from clean sources such as nuclear, geothermal or solar batteries. A little worse would be natural gas. Much worse would be coal.
The reconciliation bill takes a series of actions to reduce the chances of data centers being fed by clean sources. Of course, it cuts the generous subsidies that the inflation reduction law created to promote clean energy, which can compensate both the axis of 30 percent of the cost of a new energy plant.
The nuclear industry, the clean source to which Republicans are more friendly, warned that the cuts could also damage them. The bill also takes an ax to the loan programs office, a tool of the energy department to invest in clean energy that is especially important for nuclear and geothermal. The Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, went so far as to ask the Republicans to mark the cuts to nuclear and geothermal; I do not believe that a cabinet member has asked for smaller cuts in any other section of the bill, but this was a concert enough to trigger intervention.
As the Thomas Hochman and Pavan Venkatakrishnan policy analysts pointed out in the Washington Post, the Congress “is almost exclusively close to competing energy sources that are executed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week”, even hurting them that the wind and solar energy. It is almost as if it were designed to make the new data centers work with dirty fuels, or perhaps to encourage companies to build them abroad.
Work requirements in a world after work
But the great, big problem with the bill is his obsession with the mantar in the most burdensome work requirements, poorly managed and ineffective in programs such as Medicaid and food coupons.
I thought the thesis were bad policies before AI became a big problem, and I am happy to rant extensively why. They are Cruuel, they do not lead people to work more, and for Medicaid in particular, even the conservatives who normally like work requirements accept that they are totally ineffective.
But backed up for just a second. At this time, the leaders of the world’s AI companies are declaring that within the decade, they can do a large part of human work. You may think that they are out of their pumpkins and nothing remotely as that will happen. It is possible. It is also possible that the thesis incredible powerful people with many billions of dollars at their disposal may be successful in what they set out to do.
That’s all also Possible that even much, much less powerful, AIS, as those available today, are possible captivating loss of significant employment. We are seeing some indications that are already happening. Even in the most slow plausible timeline for the AI I can imagine, it will still have companies like Waymo that use it to displace human work in specific industries.
In a world where Uber drivers and trucks are suddenly without work because there are no failures or their own, adding work requirements to food coupons and Medicaid is cruel. He won to find work, at least in the short term; The work in his vocation is gone. Maybe change occupations should change, but are we really sure that your new work won is automated in the same way? Do you not need help while they make the transition?
Vice President JD Vance delivered a speech in March where he remembered the steel plant in his hometown of Ohio, saying: “It was the soul of the city in which I grew up. When it went from 10,000 jobs to 2,000 jobs, the US work that the people who begin keeping people who start people.
But your party’s budget bill does exactly that. Go to people whose livelihood could be imminently destroyed and activate It takes away the support. “Can’t we keep doing that”? You are doing that Right now.
In a truly transformative world, automating 10 or 20 or perhaps 100 percent of human work, work requirements go from cruel to a combination of cruel, strange and silly. It would be as if Congress were today, to approve a dedicated law that established work standards for horses and bottled drivers. Imagine telling people in a transformative world “you have to work to get food coupons.” Work? What work? Unemployed is 30 percent and the increase, what are you talking about?
David Sacks, a risk capitalist and one of Trump’s closest advisors about AI, has generally been derogatory about the AI potential to threaten jobs. But even the one granted in a recent episode of his All Podcast, “if there is a wide labor interruption, then obviously The government will have to react and we will be in a very different social order. “
At the same time, in X, he declares: “The future of AI has become a Rorschach test where everyone sees what they want. The left provides for a posteconomic order in which people stop working and the Government of Recoeve Insalfuel. It will happen.”
Well, you don’t want that. But the AI will certainly displace many jobs if it will not eliminate them, and the fired admits that it needs a massive government intervention in that case. I have no clear idea of what that intervention would be like; We know very little about how this technology will spread through society, how fast it will improve and what this means for jobs. It is an area that needs much more attention, from AI, governments and civil society companies.
But I feel sure of a point. AI will make some employment more precarious. Occupations will be threatened. People will lose their jobs. The questions are how many of them will do and how quickly new ones will get.
Given all that, adding new work requirements to security networks is not just cruel or reckless. It is a sign that this administration, and its technological advisors such as Sacks, do not take the future of AI seriously.
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