The Rise of the AI Moderates

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

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.

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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. 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 wrote about a poker game he had in New York recently with a bunch of bankers, doctors, insurance executives, et cetera, 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 percent of respondents saying that it would mostly help. The United States, on the other hand, was fourth from the bottom with only 36 percent 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 accelerationist 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 polyannish, 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, Fukuyama has been an extremely influential thinker when it comes to political 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.

That book generated a huge amount of discourse. Its most famous response was Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, which argued that culture and religion rather than ideology would drive future conflict. But whatever one thinks about the end of history thesis and how it has held up or not, the point is that Fukuyama has been a key political theorist for more than three decades now.

Last week, Fukuyama released an essay called Why I Changed My Mind About AI Risk on Accelerationists and Doomers. In it, he wrote, The past six months have seen a big uptick in media attention about the dangers of artificial intelligence and growing political concern over its consequences. This began with Anthropix released last April of its Mythos model, which could reportedly break into a wide range of government computer systems thought to be secure. This was followed by the Hugging Face incident, where an open AI test of an AI agent escaped control of its human organizers, broke into other websites and organized a swarm of other AI agents to cover their tracks. All of this occurred against the backdrop of growing opposition to data centers and the emergence of anti-AI wings in both the Democratic and Republican parties.