Chapter 1: What violent attacks have occurred against Sam Altman and why?
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Chapter 2: How is the American public responding to AI developments?
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Chapter 3: What does the rise of anti-AI sentiment indicate for the future?
Today's number, 12,000. That's how many comments Trump received on an image he posted of himself depicted as Jesus before it was taken down. According to the president, he meant to be portrayed as a doctor. That was right after he called the Pope weak and terrible. And in other news, panic on Wall Street as traders prepare for the rapture.
Welcome to Profit View Markets.
I'm Ed Elson. It is April 15th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices rose as President Trump signaled he was open to talks with Iran. That pushed the Nasdaq to its 10th straight gain, while the S&P 500 came close to a record high. Oil prices fell below $100 a barrel. Bank stocks were mixed after earnings. Wells Fargo fell 5%, while Citigroup rose nearly 3%.
We'll be breaking down all those bank earnings on tomorrow's episode.
Chapter 4: How do historical movements like the Luddites relate to today's AI backlash?
And finally, Amazon shares rose nearly 4% after the company acquired Starlink's biggest competitor, Globalstar. Okay, what else is happening? AI has a popularity problem, and it is now getting violent. Last week in Indiana, a local councilman's home was shot at 13 times after he voiced support for a data center project in his town, a sign reading, quote, no data centers was left at his door.
Then Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, was targeted twice in the same weekend. A man threw a Molotov cocktail at his home on Friday and threatened to burn down OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters. Police recovered a document from the suspect warning of humanity's, quote, impending extinction from AI, as well as a list of names and addresses of CEOs and investors of AI companies.
The 20-year-old has been charged with attempted murder and faces a second count of attempted murder for the security guard who was at Altman's house. Separately, two people were arrested for firing shots at Altman's house on Sunday. These attacks are an extreme manifestation of the rising anti-AI sentiment in the US.
Among 31 countries surveyed, Americans reported the lowest level of trust in their own government to regulate AI at just 31%. And people are now acting on that distrust. In just two years, $64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition.
So here to discuss these disturbing headlines and AI's general popularity problem in this country, we are having another panel discussion with two experts. We've got Bradley Tusk,
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Chapter 5: What role do politicians play in the AI regulation debate?
founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures, and Brian Merchant, tech journalist and author of the Blood in the Machine substack. Bradley and Brian, thank you very much for joining me on the show here. Bradley, I'll start with you. I mean, this news of Sam Altman, two attacks in the span of just a few days.
It really is just a striking example of this growing feeling in America that I've talked about, I know you've talked about, and that is a lot of people just don't like AI at this point. What do you make of this news and what does it say about this moment?
Yeah, I mean, I think people don't like a lot of things. And to be clear, regardless of what you think of either AI or Sam Altman, no one should be throwing Molotov cocktails at his home or anyone's home. But I think you've got a combination of one, just general distrust or happiness in this country, right?
Whether it is the fact that we are 23rd in the world's happiness report or 62nd for people under the age of 25. whether it's the fact that our government seems to be hijacked by stringists on both sides of the aisle, whether it's the fact that we haven't regulated Internet 2.0 yet. So even things like social media have never been dealt with by Washington, let alone AI.
And then combine that with the fact that AI is really unpopular. I saw a YouGov poll that showed that people had a
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Chapter 6: What are the potential policy responses to AI-related violence?
47 to 27 by margin of people. Distrust of AI, people think that AI will replace a lot more jobs than it creates. Almost every different survey mechanism out there shows that people are fearful. And then anecdotally, when you just talk to people, they feel the same way. Then you mentioned in the intro, local opposition blocking the construction of data centers.
I think that's often the fault of the hyperscalers who seem to think that it would be okay to pass along all of their energy costs to regular consumers, right? And if you are living near a data center, the idea that your electricity bills should go up 30%, 40% to subsidize Sam Altman or Jensen Wong or whoever it is so that they can become trillionaires is unacceptable.
And in this case, I think it's actually elected officials on both sides of the aisle. acting in the interest to protect their constituents. And so, yeah, when you have a government that consistently fails to regulate technology, when you have a government that feels run by the extremes and you have a society that's generally unhappy, these are unfortunately the kind of things that come from it.
Brian, you've written about this before, and your book is about actually the Luddite movement, which is sort of the first iteration of technology coming along, people getting very worried about it and revolting, essentially. What do you make of the attacks on Sam Altman? What does it say to you?
Well, I mean, what it says to me is that this discontent, these grievances that people have are real, they are pronounced, and we have to look at them as if, you know, some of these people are obviously on the extreme end of whether it's a political spectrum or an ideology. At least one of these shooters was
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Chapter 7: How can we balance innovation with public safety regarding AI?
You know, one of these X-risk AI safety advocates who's really worried that AI is going to rise up and become sentient and end humanity. And so if you believe that, then, you know, doing all you can, you know, may look like a rational outcome as abhorrent as it looks to everybody else. And to step back a second, we do have a long history, right, when there is a disruptive technology, number one.
Number two, that is being developed and sort of unleashed by a particular sort of group of interests, right, when you have in the Luddites' time, that was the factory owners who were spearheading factorization and automation. They were doing it without community input, without asking what workers and communities, what they wanted.
We have a dynamic that looks an awful lot like what's happening here today, where you have a few industrialists who had the backing of the state, they had all the resources, they had all the capital, they had all the power, And they were saying, this is the way it's going to be. We're going to automate jobs this way.
And you're either going to sort of work in our factory or you're going to get out of the way. And the Luddites, who actually registered, this is one of the things that people get wrong about the Luddites today, is they weren't dummies. They weren't backwards looking. They understood quite well what was happening. They were technologists. They used this stuff every day.
Chapter 8: What lessons can we learn from past technological disruptions?
They used the automated technology. technologies in smaller iterations in their workshops and at home. And so they understood what the industrialists were trying to do, and that's what motivated their response. They didn't want to see their way of life subsumed by factorization, given over to a relatively
handful of interests so it was really about power it was about democracy and it was about losing agency and so today a lot of the backlash we see against ai is motivated by these very same fears and concerns in no small part because the ai ceos and tech titans themselves have come out and used this language right from the beginning they've said oh this technology is so powerful
It could be big trouble for humanity. It could be the gravest thing humanity has ever faced if we're not careful with it. It's going to eliminate 20 to 30 to 50 percent of jobs, you know, depending on how Dario Amadei at Anthropic is feeling. And it is going to be this huge disruptive event. And that's how they're forecasting. That's how they're describing their own project, their own business.
And so, again— Why would anybody, you know, not take that seriously, right? We take it serious at different levels, but, and some people will attach themselves to the X risk element and say, well, we don't want to exterminate humanity. And most people will say, hey, I'm out here listening. And you're saying you want to automate all the jobs with AI tools.
You want to automate, why would I be okay with that? Why would I trade that? Why would I allow a data center in my backyard to help you in that project? So to me, all of this backlash, you know, I'm honestly a little surprised it hasn't arrived a little bit sooner, just how aggressive the industry and its leadership has often been. Yeah.
Yeah, this gets to sort of the PR and comms point. And Bradley, I mean, you've worked in exactly this sector. You've worked in politics. You've worked in tech and politics and how they come together. And there is this interesting question, which is like, well...
all of the big AI CEOs are telling us that this technology is in a lot of ways quite scary and in some cases bad, like it's going to destroy things, it's going to destroy white-collar work, it's going to completely disrupt the economic model as we know it. And they've done it in a way that is legitimately quite scary. And I guess it does beg the question of like, I mean, why say that?
If you're the CEO of a technology company, why would you come out and say this technology is going to be really bad and it's going to really negatively impact a lot of people's lives? I mean, what do you make of the calm strategy there?
Yeah, I mean, I think that, keep in mind, from their perspective, comms is a couple of different things at the same time. It's the way we're talking about it right now, which is how the public might perceive something, how regulators and lawmakers might perceive it, but it's also fundraising, right? So OpenAI and Anthropic are still both privately held companies with giant valuations.
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