Jasmine Sun

And now, whether you poll for right-wing figures or left-wing figures, you get numbers like 10% to 20% of Americans think that assassination attempts are justified when they're directed as people who you think are bad people, whether that is Nancy Pelosi's husband or whether that is Donald Trump or whether that is the UnitedHealthcare CEO.

And so the thing that I notice with, you know, Sam Altman's attackers, like with the other attackers, is that these are young people who have developed a pretty nihilistic politics, whose views might be increasingly extreme as a result of participating in online communities where people kind of reinforce each other's beliefs really quickly in the cycle, and who also believe that they have no other outlet but political violence.

I think that when I think about the resentment that people feel or...

why do crazy things like this happen?

Like, I am no fan of political violence.

You know, like, why would someone do something like this?

What I really see is these people no longer believe that the democratic system works.

They do not believe they have any other channel to, quote unquote, have a voice or to shape the direction of what happens to politics, what happens to the economy.

And they see direct action, in this case, direct violent action as the only way of making their voice heard in order to stop some of the changes they think are coming.

I mean, I see this at a lesser scale with things like data center protests or something like that.

It's like, you know, a lot of my friends in the AI industry, for example, think that the data center protests are really stupid.

Like they're like, data centers are the wrong target.

If you are worried about AI safety, you should pursue regulation or something.

But I'm like,

Do normal people have any channel to pursue regulation or to shape how these models are trained or what the products look like?

They don't.

They don't.

They don't know anybody who works in AI policy.

They don't know anyone who works at an AI lab.

If they feel like they are being forced to use AI in particular ways that they don't like or that it's threatening their job or their kids' safety, they do not actually have a lot of channels to express that discontent.