Ben Buchanan
speaker
133 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Ben Buchanan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So I think he is setting up a dichotomy there that I don't quite agree with. And the irony of that is, if you look at the rest of his speech, which I did watch, there's actually a lot that I do agree with. So he talks, for example, I think he's got four pillars in the speech. One's about centering the importance of workers.
One's about American preeminence and like, those are entirely consistent with the actions that we took and the philosophy that I think the administration, which I was a part espoused, and I certainly believe. Insofar as what he is saying is that safety and opportunity are in fundamental tension, then I disagree.
And I think if you look at the history of technology and technology adaptation, the evidence is pretty clear that the right amount of safety action unleashes opportunity and, in fact, unleashes speed. So one of the examples that we studied a lot and talked to the president about was the early days of railroads.
And in the early days of railroads, there were tons of accidents and crashes and deaths. And people were not inclined to use railroads as a result. And then what started happening was safety standards and safety technology. Block signaling, so that trains could know when they were in the same area. Air brakes, so that trains could brake more efficiently.
standardization of train track widths and gauges and the like. And this was not always popular at the time. But with the benefit of hindsight, it is very clear that that kind of technology and to some degree policy development of safety standards made the American railroad system in the late 1800s. And I think this is a pattern that shows up a bunch throughout the history of technology.
To be very clear, it is not the case that every safety regulation, every technology is good. And there certainly are cases where you can overreach and you can slow things down and choke things off. But I don't think it's true. There's a fundamental tension between safety and opportunity.
The question then is, when you look at the actions we have taken on AI, are we strangling in the crib and have we taken actions that are akin to... I'm not saying that we've already done it.
Yeah, I think that's a profound question. I think what we tried to do in the Biden administration was set up the kind of institutions in the government to do that in as clear-eyed, tech-savvy a way as possible. Again, with the one exception of the safety test results sharing, which some of the CEOs estimate cost them one day of employee work.
We did not put anything close to regulation in place whatsoever. We create something called the AI Safety Institute, purely national security focused, cyber risks, bio risks, AI accident risks, purely voluntary. So, and that has relationships, memorandum of understanding with Anthropic, with OpenAI, even with XAI, Elon's company.
And basically, I think we saw that as an opportunity to bring AI expertise into the government to build relationships between public and private sector in a voluntary way. And then as the technology develops, it will be up to now the Trump administration decide what they want to do with it.
I think it's fair to say that there is a cultural difference with the Trump administration and us on some of these things. But I also, you know, we held conferences on what you could do with AI and the benefits of AI. We talked all the time about how you need to mitigate these risks, but you're doing so so you can capture the benefits.
And I'm someone who reads an essay like Dario Amadei's Sea of Anthropics, Machines of Love and Grace, about basically the upside of AI. And so there's a lot in here we can agree with. President's executive order said we should be using AI more in the executive branch. So I hear you on the cultural difference. I get that.
But I think when the rubber meets the road, we were comfortable with the notion that you could both realize the opportunity of AI while doing it safely. And now that they are in power, they will have to decide how do they translate Vice President Vance's rhetoric into a governing policy.
And my understanding of their executive order is they've given themselves six months to figure out what they're going to do. And I think we should judge them on what they do.
Yeah, I think I basically agree with all of that. I think the conversation when we were in the government, especially in 23 and 24, was starting to happen. We looked at the clinical trials thing. You've read about healthcare for however long. I don't claim expertise on healthcare, but it does seem to me that...
We want to get to a world where we can take the breakthroughs, including breakthroughs from AI systems, and translate them to market much faster. This is not a hypothetical thing.
It's worth noting, I think, quite recently, Google came out with, I think they called it co-scientist, NVIDIA and the ARC Institute, which does great work, had the most impressive biodesign model ever that has a much more detailed understanding of biological molecules. A group called Future House has done similarly great work in science. So I don't think this is a hypothetical.
I think this is happening right now. And I agree with you that there's a lot that can be done institutionally and organizationally to get the federal government ready for this.
It feels kind of orthogonal from what I've observed from Doge. I mean, I think Elon is someone who does understand what AI can do, but I don't know how starting with USAID, for example, prepares the U.S. government to make better AI policy. So I guess I don't buy it, that that is the motivation for Doge.
I couldn't agree more. I mean, the existence of my job in the White House, the White House Special Advisor for AI, which David Sachs now is, and I had this job in 2023, existed because President Biden said very clearly, publicly and privately, we cannot move at the typical government pace. We have to move faster here. I think we probably need to be careful.
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