The Rise of the AI Moderates
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The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
32 min
1 speaker
3 chapters
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Why are extreme AI opinions dominating the debate?
Are extreme opinions the only valid opinions when it comes to AI? One could certainly be forgiven for thinking so, given the state of the discourse. And yet increasingly, the people who can see AI with both trepidation and excitement, and concern but also wonder, are starting to find their unique voice. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
Alright friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Blitzy, Robots and Pencils, Harbor, and HyperAgent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/slash AIDalybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at aidaybrief.ai. Also thanks to everyone who has done the fall listener survey so far that is still open, and I would super appreciate it if you would take a couple minutes to do it. You can find the link on the website. But for now, let's get into this big thingslash long reads episode. One would have to be living under a rock right now to not have noticed a serious negative downshift in the AI discourse here in the US of A.
Which is not, of course, to say that somehow up until recently the AI conversation was particularly positive. But in the last couple of months, even from an already pretty negative place, it has taken an absolute nosedive. Now part of this is of course based on real evidence like the Hugging Face incident, and part of it is by an endless onslaught of mainstream media coverage about the potential that AI kills us all. Speaking to the Times AI content creator Riley Brown, he wrote about a poker game he had in New York recently with a bunch of bankers, doctors, insurance executives, etc., basically people outside of AI, where he noticed the strange dichotomy of them all using and liking the new Muse personal agent from Meta, but also being, in his words, fully convinced that AI would kill everyone at some point in the next 10 years.
And it's not just anecdotal either. A very recent Gallup poll looked into opinions. About AI and found US attitudes just absolutely in the dumps. On the question of whether AI will mostly help or mostly harm people in this country, China had the most optimistic response, with 93% of respondents saying that it would mostly help. The United States, on the other hand, was fourth from the bottom, with only 36% saying that AI will mostly help. And yet, I have long contended that the actual belief set for most people around AI is some combination of A, way more in the middle than either the accelerationists on the one side or the Doomers on the other, and B, in most cases, still fairly unformed. Now, maybe those attitudes are hardening a little bit as things like data centers enter the political discourse and as we get more and more mainstream articles about things like X Risk.
But I still think that by and large, even if some people are starting to crystallize their opinions, I think for many those opinions aren't yet strongly held. Which is why I'm encouraged to see something that I might call the rise of the AI moderates. These are people who are outside of the AI or Tech industry, who refuse to be either gloom and doom or endlessly Pollyanish, and are instead trying to find a specific thoughtful middle space that can presumably give rise to better policies and ways of engaging with AI. In this episode, I want to share a couple of examples of that, starting with an essay from political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Now, for more than 30 years, Fukiyama has been an extremely influential thinker when it comes to political science.
Science and political philosophy. His best known work was the 1992 book The End of History of the Last Man, in which he argued that with fascism beaten and communism collapsing, no serious universal rival to liberal democracy plus market economics was left. Basically, although countries might lag behind or backslide into one of those areas, there was really nowhere further to go.
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