I think a major obstacle is a lack of trust in the government in general. Almost nobody expects the government to do right by its constituents anymore, even when it would cost very little. Removing an entire industry—and an industry that appears to be the only healthy/growing segment of the economy, at that—seems beyond the pale.
While rhetoric differs, there seems to be a bipartisan acceptance that, if the people currently in power wish to remain so, they’ll need a wunderwaffen. The military suffers from a recruiting and innovation crisis, the education system seems to have been co-opted by rent-seekers even as every success metric careens downwards, manufacturing has the occasional success story but remains largely stagnant, and the only point of unity between the two parties’ voter bases is that the status quo is intolerably bad, perhaps to the point of necessitating a civil conflict.
AI may not be popular, but the people who believe it will fix everything appear to be the only group of people who think anything is going to be fixed, and the people in charge are inclined to listen to the one group telling them that there’s a chance for them to recover their former prestige. The choice that seems to be before them is “gamble on AI, and maybe win power for the rest of history” versus “don’t gamble, and definitely lose, either to China, or to populist reform, or to a gradual decay into irrelevance”. At the very least, I think that’s how the segment of the public concerned about AI views the elite’s decision-making process.
I think a major obstacle is a lack of trust in the government in general. Almost nobody expects the government to do right by its constituents anymore, even when it would cost very little. Removing an entire industry—and an industry that appears to be the only healthy/growing segment of the economy, at that—seems beyond the pale.
While rhetoric differs, there seems to be a bipartisan acceptance that, if the people currently in power wish to remain so, they’ll need a wunderwaffen. The military suffers from a recruiting and innovation crisis, the education system seems to have been co-opted by rent-seekers even as every success metric careens downwards, manufacturing has the occasional success story but remains largely stagnant, and the only point of unity between the two parties’ voter bases is that the status quo is intolerably bad, perhaps to the point of necessitating a civil conflict.
AI may not be popular, but the people who believe it will fix everything appear to be the only group of people who think anything is going to be fixed, and the people in charge are inclined to listen to the one group telling them that there’s a chance for them to recover their former prestige. The choice that seems to be before them is “gamble on AI, and maybe win power for the rest of history” versus “don’t gamble, and definitely lose, either to China, or to populist reform, or to a gradual decay into irrelevance”. At the very least, I think that’s how the segment of the public concerned about AI views the elite’s decision-making process.
This is a reason for “stop” over “regulate;” it takes less dexterity to wield a hammer than scalpel.