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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And I'm not here for stripping it all down, but I agree with you. We have to move much faster.
Yeah, I think the honest answer here is we had conversations with Europe as they were drafting the EU AI Act. But at the time that I was in, the EU AI Act was still kind of nascent and the act had passed. But a lot of the actual details of it had been kicked to a process that my sense is still unfolding. So speaking of slow moving. Yeah, I mean, bureaucracies. Exactly. Exactly.
So I guess I didn't have from maybe this is a failing on my part. I did not have particularly detailed conversations with the Europeans beyond a general kind of articulation of our views. They were respectful. We were respectful. But I think it's fair to say we were taking a different approach than they were taking.
And we were probably, insofar as safety and opportunity are a dichotomy, which I don't think they are a pure dichotomy, we were ready to move very fast in the development of AI.
It's a vital question. I think we instantiate that in a couple of different principles. The first is that AI in the workplace needs to be implemented in a way that is respectful of workers and the like. And I think one of the things I know the president thought a lot about was
it is possible for AI to make workplaces worse and in a way that is dehumanizing and degrading and ultimately destructive for workers. So that is sort of a first distinct piece of it that I don't want to neglect. The second is I think we want to have AI deployed across our economy in a way that increases workers' agencies and capabilities.
And I think we should be honest that there's going to be a lot of transition in the economy as a result of AI. I don't know what that will look like. You can find Nobel Prize winning economists who will say it won't be much. You can find other folks who will say it'll be a ton. I tend to lean towards the it's going to be a lot side, but I'm not a labor economist.
And the line that Vice President Vance used is the exact same phrase that President Biden used, which is give workers a seat at the table in that transition. And I think that is a fundamental part of what we're trying to do here. And I presume what they're trying to do here.
Yeah.
I think that is basically true, but I want to push back a little bit. So I do think we are going to see a dynamic in which it will hit parts of the economy first, it will hit certain firms first, but it will be an uneven distribution across society.
Yeah, we did talk to economists and try to texture this debate in 23 and 24. I think... The trend line is even clearer now than it was then. I think we knew this was not going to be a 23 and 24 question. Frankly, to do anything robust about this is going to require Congress, and that was just not in the cards at all. So it was more of an intellectual exercise than it was a policy exercise.
Sure, yeah. I think that's fair. I think the advantage to AI that... is in some ways a countervailing force here, though I hear you and I mostly agree with your side's argument, is that it will increase the amount of agency for individual people.
So I do think we will be in a world in which the 19-year-old or the 25-year-old will be able to use a system to do things they were not able to do before. And I think insofar as The thesis we're batting around here is that intelligence will become a little bit more commoditized. What will stand out more in that world is agency and the capacity to do things or initiative and the like.
And I think that could, in the aggregate, lead to a pretty dynamic economy. And the economy you're talking about of small firms and dynamic ecosystem and robust competition, I think on balance, at an economy scale, is not in itself a bad thing.
I think where I imagine you and I agree and maybe Vice President Vance as well agree is we need to make sure that for individual workers and classes of workers, they're protected in that transition. I think we should be honest. That's going to be very hard. We have never done that well.
So I think, yes, we were thinking about this question. I think we knew it was not going to be a question we were going to confront in the president's term. We knew it was a question that you would need Congress for to do anything about it. I think insofar as what you're expressing here seems to me to be like a deep dissatisfaction with the available answers. I share that.
I think a lot of us shared that. You can get the usual stock answers of a lot of retraining. I share your sort of doubts that that is the answer. You probably talk to some Silicon Valley libertarians or something and they'll say, or tech folks, and they'll say, well, universal basic income.
I think I believe and I think the president believes there's a kind of dignity that work brings and doesn't have to be paid work, but there needs to be something that people do each day that gives them meaning overall. In so far as what you were saying is like you have a discomfort with where this is going on the labor side. Speaking for myself, I share that. I guess I don't know the shape of it.
Well, you know, we definitely didn't have Claude write up a brief because we had to get over government use of AI. See, but that's like itself slightly damning. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Ezra, I agree that the government has to be more forward-leaning on basically all of these dimensions. It was my job to push the government to do that.
And I think on things like government use of AI, we made some progress. So I don't think anyone from the Biden administration, less of all me, is coming out and saying, we solved it.
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