Rick Wilson & Johnny Garcia

Molly Jong-Fast (0:00)

Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.

And former President Obama is urging Democrats to move AI oversight to the center of their agenda. We have such a great show for you today, The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson joins us to discuss Trump weaponizing the DOJ against Gavin Newsom. Then we'll talk to Johnny Garcia about his run for Texas's 35th District. But first the news.

Molly Jong-Fast (0:31)

So Molly, no big deal. You know, we just have whistleblowers saying that AI may end humanity. You know, nothing to be concerned about. But it turns out, because the house, Mike Johnson, he's not that concerned about the end of the world as we know it.

Molly Jong-Fast (0:45)

Yeah, he's not actually.

Johnson calls for AI solutions, but says Congress won't take the lead. So who will, Mike? Who will? Certainly not Mike Johnson. The head of Anthropic wrote this 3,800 word essay.

He hopefully wrote it, probably didn't, saying that they should slow AI development. We had a whistleblower this week say that we have Elon, the richest man in the world. So again, what do we want? We want Congress to enact some regulations and safeguards, protect us from AI. Is that going to happen? I don't know. Again, this is a situation where we have the legislators, and those legislators are not able to really understand what's happening here, as are a lot of us. Some people are against the regulation. They include mostly Donald Trump and David's Act. Both people who are uniquely poised to pretend not to understand what's happening, or to legitimately not understand what's happening. So again, I think the hope is that there'll be some larger group of people who understand AI, who will get together and try to put in some safeguards. But I think this is very tough. And David's Act, who was the White House AI saw before he decided he could make more money not being that. He doesn't want any regulation. You'll be shocked to hear. So this is all really scary and bad. You're going to hear more about this, but probably not as much as you should. I think we all have to just sort of hope and pray that there are some, that there are people who are listening who are better angels here, because there really isn't a possibility for disaster here. And I mean, I think there are also, there are other things going on here, right? Like there are certainly these big companies would like to have regulatory capture to prevent competition. Many things can be true at once, right? Like companies would like regulatory capture so that younger companies cannot compete with them. Also companies see that a lot of what we saw with Hugging Face was that these AI agents are hard to control and can slip out of the places that they're supposed to be and cover their traps. There's a sense in which we may have lost control of what's happening here when it comes to AI, and that is very scary.

Molly Jong-Fast (3:03)

The reason these tech bros are embracing this is that open-source AI is, and you know, as somebody who really follows this, it's the scariest part of this because open-source AI, while it makes for democratization, is a great threat to the profits of these companies, and more egalitarian, it also can lead to chemical weapons plans leaking very easily.

Molly Jong-Fast (3:26)

Yeah. I mean, I think there are two things happening here. There's real danger, and there's also a real opportunity to try to prevent competition. But I think that certainly when it comes to open-source stuff, in a functional government, a functional American president would call up Xi and say, like, President Xi, we got to get together here. This is like nuclear proliferation. We don't need to all die. Let's try to figure it away to keep these machines from killing us all. And at least we would have these two enormous governments trying to prevent what is a doomsday scenario. Unfortunately, we don't have a government like that. We have Donald Trump, who is really excited because President Xi is coming to visit, and he's laser focused on what he's going to feed him for dinner and what he's going to show him when it comes to Corinthian columns. And this is what happens when you make a very stupid person president.

Molly Jong-Fast (4:26)

So speaking of very stupid, as we know, the right is always looking for ways to smear Zora Momdani, the mayor of our lovely city, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So a camera pan that showed them smiling as they greeted each other is now the biggest controversy the right wing has ever seen, because they've never done anything to desecrate 9-11, they never did anything at all that helped make the events of 9-11 worse.