Donald Trump is taking the enormously complex debate over artificial intelligence and has reduced recent warnings about AI killing all of humanity to a "sick conspiracy" to sabotage America.
Trump wants as light a regulatory hand on AI as can safely be managed. That much has been clear since the start of his presidency. Now, Trump appears to be making the warnings coming from several industry leaders a "hoax."
"The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT," Trump wrote in a barrage of pro-AI Truth Social posts, where he accused Democrats of stoking the panic.
Trump is recasting the AI safety debate in starkly personal terms. He placed AI doomerism on the same plane as Russiagate, climate change, and his two impeachments.
Proponents of fast AI development claim that anyone who uses apocalyptic language to describe one possible outcome from developing AI is reaching for the worst-case scenario. There are as many scenarios where AI becomes a transformative technology as there are harmful, even catastrophic ones.
"Will AI create a utopia where all diseases can be cured, and no one will have to work if they don’t desire to? Or will AI bring about a doomsday scenario in which agents go rogue and turn on humans, bringing about an extinction-level event?" asks Barron's.
When steamboats first began to ply the Mississippi River, people called for them to be banned. Between 1810 and 1840, nearly 4,000 total maritime fatalities occurred on the Mississippi River system, largely driven by catastrophic boiler failures and shipboard fires. The Steamboat Act of 1852 helped mitigate accidents, although the worst steamboat boiler accident occurred in 1865, when 1,800 freed Union soldiers traveling on their way home on the SS Sultana were killed when the ship exploded near Memphis.
All new technologies come with risks. I believe we should listen to the warnings and act with appropriate caution. This won't stop development in most areas of artificial intelligence, but where prudence dictates a slowdown, we should heed common sense.
Trump's campaign against AI doomerism then spilled onto the stage of the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took a call from the president in the middle of a live interview.
Addressing thousands of tech executives, investors and founders on speakerphone, Trump dismissed fears of an AI takeover as a "hoax" and assured the crowd that "the robots will not be taking over."
Between the lines: Trump is grafting his own political grievances onto a counternarrative already taking hold among his Silicon Valley allies: that the AI panic is manufactured.
David Sacks, Trump's influential AI adviser and "All-In" podcaster, has portrayed AI alarmism as the work of a well-funded "Doomer Industrial Complex" that includes former Biden officials.
As the latest warnings exploded across social media last week, Sacks and his co-hosts suggested the backlash was a coordinated "psyop" tied to election season and the growing threat from open-source AI.
Calling the warnings a "manufactured hoax" is not helpful. It may be politically advantageous for the president to point to opposition to him personally, but even if there is, the stakes are far too high to play political games. This is a race to determine the future of billions of people. It transcends the petty political posturing of Donald Trump and his opponents.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is with Trump when it comes to continuing AI development.
“Those predictions are inconsistent with ultimately America winning the AI race,” Huang told Trump during a phone call Monday at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, Calif.
What seems clear, however, is that the only sure thing that can be said about AI technology and what effect it will have on the economy is that we really don’t know.
As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “there are unknown unknowns.” The endgame of AI lies seems to lie somewhere in that grey area even as politicians, the AI frontier lab executives, and investors make bold predictions about what the future will look like.
“A glance through history would give any investor indigestion. Most predictions are wrong,” wrote Deutsche Bank Research analyst Adrian Cox.
Cox added a wrinkle to questions about AI, not only wondering “what it will be able to do but also when it will be able to do it.”
The major danger, according to the doomers, is that we're moving faster than safety allows. Huang and Trump think that danger is overblown. Since trust in large corporations and the government is at an all-time low, ambitious politicians looking to advance by scaring people about AI are ratcheting up hysteria (I'm looking at you, Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon).
I much prefer Trump's laissez-faire approach to AI regulation to Bernie Sanders' strangulation approach. In the end, it won't matter. AI is coming whether we're ready or not, and we can't control how fast it arrives.
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