The left is a big tent. Here’s two writings on AI by people who are active and respected on the left: Mike Monteiro saying there will be “a beacon in space roughly where Earth used to be”, and Sam Kriss saying AI “might kill every single person on the face of the Earth”. There are plenty of people on the left with such views, and if AI safety-minded people joined, there’d be even more.
It’s true that there’s a strong focus on present harms. But that’s just a fact about the left, they are attuned to harms that are actually happening. To use that as a reason to decline alliance with the left, and instead go “bipartisan” and court the right who are all “go industry, go war” while ignoring all harms present and future, seems very wrong to me. I think it’s been one of the biggest missed chances in our community, and I’m hopeful we can still change course on this.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think maybe you misread a bit. My point was that many safety-minded people, attracted by writings on LW and other places and not having a leftish “immune system”, decided to join for-profit AI labs to work on alignment. It might seem harsh to call them “enablers” for that, but I stand by that characterization. See more on my reasoning in this comment.
This doesn’t take away from the correct argument that there are prominent leftists who are very vocal about existential AI risk, including really prominent people like Bernie Sanders. But for the most part, the left movement is focusing (as you say yourself) on the more mundane harms. This is not necessarily bad, but it means that there is a fundamentally different focus.
As for the right, it is interesting that you (correctly) insist that the left is a “big tent” with many opinions, but then the right is a uniform bloc that wants to “go industry, go war.” There are plenty of Republican politicians seriously worried about AI. Just look at Josh Hawley, Marsha Blackburn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ron DeSantis. Are we really sure that the AI safety movement has no touchpoints with people who say things like “we have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years, and giving it free rein and tying states’ hands is potentially dangerous”? Because I am not.
Even Trump himself stated in 2024 that AI is “scary” and “dangerous.” Yes, his current policy does not support this view, but I press “F” to doubt that there is absolutely no way the Republicans can be reached on this issue. I agree that it will be very hard, but very hard problems are the whole business of AI safety.
Being able to do outreach to Republicans has a very important pragmatic reason, by the way: they are the ones in power right now, and they will be in power until at least 2028 (even if the midterms reshuffle the board a bit). Not to mention that it is absolutely not a given that the Democrats will win the 2028 election. Therefore, if you think that something like https://ai-2027.com/ is even remotely reasonable, then Republican support will be extremely important. And if not, then there is a fundamental difference here between “AI is the most transformative technology ever, and it might/will likely kill everyone if left unchecked, and it might happen very soon” (AI safety movement) and “AI will produce nasty deepfakes and do various other mundane harms” (left movement). That doesn’t take away from the deepfakes! They are nasty! But there is a large difference between “might end the world” and “will do various nasty things that we will have to deal with as a society but will definitely not end the world.”
The two writers you quote are not really evidence of leftist receptivity to the idea of AI as an extinction risk. In both cases, they are focused on AI as a cause of cultural degradation, and are simply giving a rhetorical nod to a vague maximum dystopia in the midst of their rant. It’s not like they are making a list of AI threats they take seriously, and then noting, oh and by the way, the AIs might take over and wipe us out, too. Their notion of long-term risks from AI is more like dysfunctional Idiocracy or farcical techbro dictatorship.
The left is a big tent. Here’s two writings on AI by people who are active and respected on the left: Mike Monteiro saying there will be “a beacon in space roughly where Earth used to be”, and Sam Kriss saying AI “might kill every single person on the face of the Earth”. There are plenty of people on the left with such views, and if AI safety-minded people joined, there’d be even more.
It’s true that there’s a strong focus on present harms. But that’s just a fact about the left, they are attuned to harms that are actually happening. To use that as a reason to decline alliance with the left, and instead go “bipartisan” and court the right who are all “go industry, go war” while ignoring all harms present and future, seems very wrong to me. I think it’s been one of the biggest missed chances in our community, and I’m hopeful we can still change course on this.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think maybe you misread a bit. My point was that many safety-minded people, attracted by writings on LW and other places and not having a leftish “immune system”, decided to join for-profit AI labs to work on alignment. It might seem harsh to call them “enablers” for that, but I stand by that characterization. See more on my reasoning in this comment.
I agree that the left is a big tent and there are always examples of every opinion present in every political movement, but I mostly agree with this take: https://www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-is-missing-out-on-ai-sanders-doctorow-bender-bores
This doesn’t take away from the correct argument that there are prominent leftists who are very vocal about existential AI risk, including really prominent people like Bernie Sanders. But for the most part, the left movement is focusing (as you say yourself) on the more mundane harms. This is not necessarily bad, but it means that there is a fundamentally different focus.
As for the right, it is interesting that you (correctly) insist that the left is a “big tent” with many opinions, but then the right is a uniform bloc that wants to “go industry, go war.” There are plenty of Republican politicians seriously worried about AI. Just look at Josh Hawley, Marsha Blackburn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ron DeSantis. Are we really sure that the AI safety movement has no touchpoints with people who say things like “we have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years, and giving it free rein and tying states’ hands is potentially dangerous”? Because I am not.
Even Trump himself stated in 2024 that AI is “scary” and “dangerous.” Yes, his current policy does not support this view, but I press “F” to doubt that there is absolutely no way the Republicans can be reached on this issue. I agree that it will be very hard, but very hard problems are the whole business of AI safety.
Being able to do outreach to Republicans has a very important pragmatic reason, by the way: they are the ones in power right now, and they will be in power until at least 2028 (even if the midterms reshuffle the board a bit). Not to mention that it is absolutely not a given that the Democrats will win the 2028 election. Therefore, if you think that something like https://ai-2027.com/ is even remotely reasonable, then Republican support will be extremely important. And if not, then there is a fundamental difference here between “AI is the most transformative technology ever, and it might/will likely kill everyone if left unchecked, and it might happen very soon” (AI safety movement) and “AI will produce nasty deepfakes and do various other mundane harms” (left movement). That doesn’t take away from the deepfakes! They are nasty! But there is a large difference between “might end the world” and “will do various nasty things that we will have to deal with as a society but will definitely not end the world.”
The two writers you quote are not really evidence of leftist receptivity to the idea of AI as an extinction risk. In both cases, they are focused on AI as a cause of cultural degradation, and are simply giving a rhetorical nod to a vague maximum dystopia in the midst of their rant. It’s not like they are making a list of AI threats they take seriously, and then noting, oh and by the way, the AIs might take over and wipe us out, too. Their notion of long-term risks from AI is more like dysfunctional Idiocracy or farcical techbro dictatorship.