Rob Wiblin

These views just on its face, they're not even intention.

Of course, people don't only care who decides who has control over AI.

They also care what they decide and what they decide to do.

I might support legislation that allows the leader of a city's fire service to close streets for public safety.

But if that fire chief started closing arbitrary streets and demanding bribes to pass through them, I wouldn't be a hypocrite for opposing that as well.

The reason people get confused here is because I think they're mentally compressing something extremely multidimensional down into a single axis of variation.

In this case, the axis being more government control of AI versus less government control of AI.

That's an absurdly crude way to think about things.

Everyone has always known full well that it doesn't just matter whether the government gets involved in this topic, it matters how it gets involved, on what terms, and what it's trying to accomplish when it does.

You won't be shocked to hear that supporters of AI regulation in general, they pick it endlessly among themselves about exactly what details here would be helpful versus harmful.

Nothing this complex and delicate is going to be possible to boil down to more government good, less government bad.

I think the debate about the abstract Pentagon dispute in particular, it got so abstract so fast, in part because for AI commentators, who should control AI is a much more interesting and important and generative topic than a narrow military contract dispute.

And in part, because for people who wanted to defend the Pentagon, it's a hell of a lot easier to defend the general principle that the government should have some say or some influence of AI than to defend what the Pentagon was actually doing in this instance.

A phenomenon at play here is that there's often a genuine trade-off between what decision-making process seems best in the abstract and our opinions about what outcome would be best in a particular case.

Say I think zoning decisions should be made at the city level.

That's the right process.

But the current mayor happens to be blocking all new housing construction while I support doing the exact opposite.

I now face a real tension.

Adopting the process that I think is best as a general rule, that is going to produce an outcome that I think is genuinely harmful, at least in the immediate term.

Reasonable people can disagree about which consideration ought to win out in any given instance.