The Case for Trump and the Future of AI – Part 1, with Samuel Hammond, Senior Economist, Foundation of American Innovation

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
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Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. This weekend, we're running two episodes which originally appeared on the moment of ZenFeed, focusing on the election, in which I attempt to give an honest hearing and questioning to two different AI forward cases for Trump. I like this exercise because in my honest opinion, this election is ultimately a referendum on Trump. My interlocutors are, in the first episode, Samuel Hammond, senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation and a thinker that I generally very much respect. We cross-posted his appearance on the Future of Life podcast last year, and I also really appreciated his 95 Theses on AI, most of which I agreed with. In the second episode, I speak with Joshua Steinman, Trump's National Security Council Senior Director for Cyber Policy and Deputy Assistant to the President from 2017 to 2021, the entire Trump term. Before launching into it, I'm going to briefly share where I've landed on Trump, as I expect a possible Trump presidency might relate to AI development. If you see AGI as a real possibility in the 2027 timeframe, it seems totally reasonable to consider the elections impact on AI as a major decision-making factor. Of course, I understand that people have other priorities, but this is not a politics channel. So I'm not going to offer my opinion on every issue, just AI and AI-adjacent issues. Interestingly, as you'll hear, I find that on a number of these AI-adjacent issues, I agree with the Trump supporters that I talked to. To name a number of them, nuclear energy is good. We should build more nuclear plants. Population decline is a problem and does merit real concern. Freedom of speech is valuable and should be protected. On the current margin, we should have fewer rules and more right to build on one's own property. We should cultivate a culture of achievement. We should aim for an age of abundance and dismiss degrowth. It makes sense to prioritize high-skilled immigration, at least to some degree. Finally, American companies like Amazon, Google, and Tesla should not be allowed to abuse their market power at the expense of consumers, but neither should they be subject to government harassment just because they are outcompeting many legacy businesses.
Fortunately, it does seem that the Democratic establishment is coming around on at least a number of these. But regardless, there are three big reasons that I cannot ultimately support Trump, despite these important points of agreement. Those are 1 He is far too inclined to escalate tension with China, accelerate decoupling, and prioritize his own narrow domestic political interests over the national and global interests. The lack of rigor in his thinking and discipline in his communications seems like a recipe for unnecessary risk-taking in an increasingly volatile environment. 3 I believe we are far better off approaching the future with a positive sum and inclusive mindset, not just within the US, but globally, if we are to have a healthy conversation about a new social contract that befits the AI era. On the question of US-China relations, I think we have a general failure of leadership and vision on both sides, unfolding slowly but gathering more momentum all the time. People now see adversarial relations with China as a foregone conclusion. Joshua Steinman calls it the physics of the environment. To put it plainly, I do not accept this. Conflict with China would be a disaster, and an arms race would take us ever closer to that disaster. But I don't see this as an inevitability, because I don't see China as a meaningful threat to America, Americans, or the American way of life. That's not to say that the Chinese government hasn't wronged us at times. Their cover-up of early COVID, whatever its origins, was definitely shameful. And obviously Chinese agencies and companies have stolen a lot of intellectual property from American companies. I don't think we should ignore that, and of course we should take steps to make ourselves less vulnerable, but I think we should stay level-headed about it. The possibility that our grandkids could be speaking Chinese one day seems far more remote to me than that AI destroys the world. I would say that the Biden administration has done OK on AI policy domestically. The 10-26 threshold for reporting requirements has aged well for a 2023 rule, and I do believe in some strategic industrial policy as well. Subsidizing the building of new chip fabs in the US so that we're not so easily disrupted by a Chinese attack on Taiwan seems, under the current circumstances, a prudent step for a great power to take. At the same time, the chip ban still feels wrong to me, and I have to admit that Kamala's rhetoric on China also depresses me. There's simply no way for China to understand recent US statements and actions other than as an attempt to keep them down. For me, this escalation seems premature at best. Given the shape of an exponential curve, we could have retained the option value of cutting them off from chip sales later, and still the bulk of the total hypothetical chip sales would have remained in the future. Relatedly, I've been really interested to see Miles Brundage, OpenAI's recently departed head of policy research, saying that we need to make a much more proactive effort to demonstrate that Western AI development is benign, which of course is much easier to do if it actually is benign, and to some degree open or otherwise shared. If we must frame our relationship with China as a competition, I would love to see us race them on metrics like life expectancy improvements, the number of diseases we can eradicate, or perhaps the tonnage that we can send to Mars. Of course, I do understand that it's a complicated situation, that naive solutions won't work, and that real solutions will be both nuanced and difficult to find. And I do intend to invite more China experts onto the show going forward in an effort to more substantively contribute to a positive vision for the future. For now, I wish that Kamala and democratic leadership in general were both less hawkish and more visionary. But considering just how much trust has already broken down and how difficult it's going to be for the two countries to make credible commitments to one another, I'd rather have a steady hand who is more predictably going to follow a sane consensus path and might actually make some arms control type deals, even if politically costly for them, to help us navigate a tricky period as well as we possibly can. Trump, I think it's well established, will do anything to avoid looking weak, has credibility with rival countries perhaps when it comes to threats, but not when it comes to positive follow through. And for me, his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, general taste for inflammatory rhetoric, and stated plans for blanket tariffs, which will hurt the American consumer in order to vaguely somehow stick it to China, all suggest to me that he is overwhelmingly likely to make things worse. Zooming out from US-China relations, while I agree with Sam Hammond when he says that the more fucked you think we are, the more willing you should be to roll the dice with Trump, I don't actually think that we are all that likely to be fucked. I've been a bit ambiguous about this over time, often saying that my P-Doom is 5% to 95%. And I've met that to reflect the fact that while nobody has convinced me that we don't need to worry about AI risk, neither has anyone convinced me that it's inevitable. After all, while we don't really know how they work and we see all sorts of surprising and sometimes alarming capabilities, today's best AIs do understand human ethics and values quite well and seem to be getting at least a bit more aligned with each passing generation. This may not continue and we should absolutely be vigilant about it, but this is a much better position for 2024 than most AI safety people expected five or ten years ago. Today, facing a decision like this referendum on Trump, I recall the words of a wise friend who told me that we should think less about what the probabilities currently are and more about what we can shift them to. Here I have to say, with competent, stable leadership, I believe we can steer towards scenarios on the lower end of that range, where the nature of the risk is more intrinsic to the technology itself unless the result of letting domestic political incentives lead us toward imprudent escalations, AI arms races, or catastrophic, impulsive decisions. I often think of the role that Kennedy played in the Cuban Missile Crisis. My understanding is that he overrode the recommendations of his military advisors to insist that the United States would not escalate to nuclear war first. That was heroic, but scenarios in which executive authority really matters can cut both ways. When I imagine Trump vs. Kamala in moments of intense crisis where a single decision could alter the course of history, I have to say, I find it much more likely that Trump would impact things substantially for the worse than substantially for the better. After all, we all saw how he handled COVID. To be clear, Kamala has not impressed me on the topic of AI either, and in general, her track record suggests not the great foresight of excellent leadership, so much as the tendency to follow local trends and incentives. We absolutely could hope for better. But still, if I have to choose a leader for a potentially highly volatile period of time, I'll take the stable, sane person who will listen to the expert consensus, even acknowledging that the experts could be wrong, rather than betting that Trump will somehow manage to override the experts in a positive way. You'll hear my conversation partners make the case, which I won't attempt to summarize here for fear of doing it too poorly, that Trump represents our best case to break out of a broken consensus and revitalize the American state for the AI era. In the end, I just don't see it. It sounds to me like chaos when we need capability. Finally, when it comes to the future of American society and the world at large, I think we have a never-before-seen opportunity to adopt a positive sum mindset, create a world of abundance, and ultimately update our social contract. I think OpenAI and other leading companies do have roughly the right vision when they talk about benefiting all humanity. And I think Sam Altman, for all the other criticisms that I have made of him, absolutely should be praised for his experiments in universal basic income. While neither candidate has shown this kind of vision, Kamala at least aims to speak and extend opportunity to all Americans. I thought her best moment at the recent debate was when she said that when Americans look at one another, quote, we see a friend. This is at least something of a foundation on which to start building a shared positive vision for the future. Trump, of course, is far more zero-sum in his thinking and negative in his outlook, and that does have real consequences. I grew up in Macomb County, Michigan, one of those bellwether counties that swung hard from Obama to Trump. And I also have family in Ohio. My beloved mamaw and papaw belonged to the same cohort as JD Vance's grandparents. They moved from rural Kentucky to southern Ohio for jobs, the whole thing. To be totally honest with you, one thing that I have seen for myself is that Trump has brought out the worst in a lot of people. Sure, JD Vance, Elon Musk, and others in Trump's orbit are no doubt more sophisticated thinkers about technology than Trump himself. But still, I cannot imagine this brand of cynical populist politics could possibly lead to a healthy national conversation about adapting to AI as it, let's face it, is going to be disrupting a lot of people's jobs, let alone reimagining what it means to contribute as a citizen or to live a good life.