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.”
I disagree that the left’s view on AI is “don’t use AI, don’t help build it, and suppress it with regulation as much as possible”. The left’s view on AI these days is much more “AI is a scam”. I don’t think it’s true that the left uses AI because of a virtuous decision to unilaterally disarm, the left doesn’t use AI because it doesn’t believe it works.
This is also why the AI safety movement is (correctly) reluctant to throw its weight behind the left (combined actions like https://stoptherace.ai/ notwithstanding). Such a decision would align the safety movement with a camp that disagrees on the core premise—namely that AI is extremely transformative. And, quite honestly, if the main problem with AI will be that it will simply not really work and there will be a bunch of scams around it, then worrying about AI just isn’t all that important (this would be the “AI as bitcoin” world).
I also disagree on the point that left people joined the labs as “enablers” en masse. Most people working for AI labs seem to be your garden-variety mostly apolitical tech nerds that like working on cool stuff.