Many people in the AI safety movement see these causes as the same thing, or the “root cause” behind all these problems. See all the talk about coordination and also Richard Ngo’s sociopolitical thinking.
Why? First, because the solutions threatened specific interests: carbon taxes and drilling restrictions would hit certain industries, and so those industries spent decades and billions deliberately coding climate as a left-wing hobbyhorse. A polarized issue is a stalled issue, after all. Second, the proposed solutions happened to rhyme with the left tribe’s preexisting preferences like regulation, international coordination, constraints on industry, so the climate change movement was nicely absorbed into the greater “left vs. right” tribal fistfight.
This is too oversimplified to be useful, really. There are many right-wing movements that have some environmentalist aims, and “regulation is a left wing idea” is so incredibly broad as to be basically useless. Take Reform UK, a right-wing party, having almost half its prospective voters being pro-climate-action, and half its prospective voters being against it (CTRL + F for “climate” in the data table). Intuitions in this space are too over-indexed on surface-level news in the last 10 years and it’s leading them astray IMO.
If you wanted to take a lesson away from environmentalism, perhaps it’s that AI safety will split along nationalist and internationalist lines. Which I suppose we’ve seen some examples of already.
Many people in the AI safety movement see these causes as the same thing, or the “root cause” behind all these problems. See all the talk about coordination and also Richard Ngo’s sociopolitical thinking.
This is too oversimplified to be useful, really. There are many right-wing movements that have some environmentalist aims, and “regulation is a left wing idea” is so incredibly broad as to be basically useless. Take Reform UK, a right-wing party, having almost half its prospective voters being pro-climate-action, and half its prospective voters being against it (CTRL + F for “climate” in the data table). Intuitions in this space are too over-indexed on surface-level news in the last 10 years and it’s leading them astray IMO.
If you wanted to take a lesson away from environmentalism, perhaps it’s that AI safety will split along nationalist and internationalist lines. Which I suppose we’ve seen some examples of already.