The authority under which this was done has been operative and actively used for several decades. It isn't a partisan issue, it is a policy of American governance. Anyone that has worked on frontier "dual use" technologies will be familiar with the legal regime.
The only thing that changed is people are writing articles about it in the news media.
I’ve dealt with these regulations across several administrations. Nothing about this is novel, it is just receiving more attention than usual. Anyone could have started caring about this decades ago. You are making an argument from unfamiliarity with the regulations as practiced.
If it takes Trump to force people to educate themselves on how the US government actually works then I guess that is at least one good thing to come out of this.
I am making an observation of fact. My feeds are full of ignorant hot takes that clearly demonstrate people have no clue about current law or how the government actually works. Your response is a perfect demonstration of this. This is neither unique to the current administration nor supporters of a particular party.
I don’t support the admin but if you are unwilling to engage with reality then that is on you.
Also known as, the tu quoque fallacy. Just because politicians in both parties have been doing this for decades doesn't mean that this administration is not especially hypocritical for doing it after whinging so much about free speech and free markets.
If by correct you mean, inconsistent with the American tradition of the rule of law and commitment to equal protection of the law, and the emergence of an authoritarian kleptocracy that picks winners and losers. Then yes. Correct.
Which has been obvious trend the last few decades and is now being done openly and shamelessly like a tinpot dicator. Largely through a new populist protectionism ideology that is popular on social media. Which makes it much more public and well documented.
Usually companies do this stuff quietly with lots of small new rules via Congress creating barriers to entry or through national security angles like the Chips act which funneled money and tax breaks to huge weathy companies, or Boeing, or the car industry, etc.
Anthropic and OpenAI went hard in the paint pushing for AI safety and it backfired into hurting their companies rather than protecting their interests.
Well, there are the political ideals expressed or embraced by the populace, and then there are politicians. AFAICT political parties at the national level and state level in the US is pure theater.
the question isn’t about size, it’s about who the government works for. Small government can promote private interests by not entering certain societal spaces, leaving them for profit making — education, healthcare, housing etc. But large government can also promote private interests, by directing tax dollars to corporations (and still not entering certain societal spaces).
It’s not about size, it’s about where it chooses to operate
Having an a collective economy governed by the “free market” is like having a pile of stones governed by gravity. There exists a primary directive force, but if you want to construct a cathedral or a bomb shelter, you need to impose some constraints, lest you revert to the angle of repose.
This is a very bad analogy. Markets behave like an imperfect optimisation algorithm, and you can prove that, under some conditions which are most often met, they give people what they want.
In fact, you can almost always expect governments to be less effective and less rational than markets in allocating resources to satisfy the desires of people, even when democratic. You can prove it either by using the same logic that tells you when markets fail (externalities, information asymmetry), or empirically by looking at what was basically the most perfect A/B test we had on society over the 20th century. Although it was a comparison between mixed economies and fully centralised ones, there is no reason to expect the optimum mix of centralisation/distribution to be closer to the worst-performing one (the fully centralised one).
You can't prove your free-market theory because it's not falsifiable.
This is why arguments about this go in circles. You either argue from a pure theoretic POV back and forth, or you go off data - at which point, bringing up every failure of free markets (like, obviously, US healthcare) is dismissed as "not really a free market"
Even the theoreticians on the free-market side are far less solid than.. all the other sides (behavioural economics, information asymmetry.. even Marx) but I regard it as deeply unpragmatic when there's so much data out there indicating what actually happens in the real world when you go one way or the other.
at which point, bringing up every failure of free markets (like, obviously, US healthcare) is dismissed as "not really a free market"
I mean, it's not. In a free market you'd have a choice of insurance providers rather than having to take whatever plan your employer offers, and you'd have some idea of what the hospital is going to charge you beforehand rather than receiving random bills for weeks.
Just to be clear, my definition of free-market is just that there is no centralised authority that can use force to set prices/quantities/quality/type of services offered.
Of course, the fact that the employer has to offer health insurance in some cases is part of it not being a free market.
But there are more fundamental things that make the US healthcare very far from being a free market. The first one is that the supply of doctors is capped in quantity, not just in quality.
> You can't prove your free-market theory because it's not falsifiable.
You can prove the logic part starting from the assumptions. It's also falsifiable. I just mentioned it was literally the most controlled test on human society you could make. We tested by splitting societies at the level of the entire planet, states and cities.
US healthcare is mostly not a free market; by free market, at minimum, I mean that the quantities and prices (ideally even the quality) are not set. The US healthcare system has a fixed number of practitioners who can get a license every year. This is as far as a market can be from being free (together with the case of having price controls). In fact, free market theory predicts that when you restrict quantity, you get higher prices for the same quality.
It literally predicts the US situation.
It's funny you mention Marx, given I regard most of his claims as either unfalsifiable or easily proven false.
That's always been a relative, rather than absolute statement.
Genuine question: if Democrats take power, do you expect them to be more interventionist or less interventionist with respect to AI? Bernie's jockeying leads me to suspect "more", but I could very well be wrong.
(FWIW I personally think modern AI falls in the small realm of potentially dangerous technologies that merit careful, ideally bipartisan, government oversight)
Bernie and AOC (which aren't DNC mainstream, but prominent) had just pushed for a moratorium on "AI data centers" with a definition that includes "that are used for the development or operation of AI models at scale" (trivially sidesteppable by "we build this GPU farm to sell to whoever bids for compute" - which is actually true), plus a bunch of fancy extras bundled in like "The government must review and approve AI products before they are released
to ensure that AI products are safe and effective.", while lacking actual definition of "AI" (given that we had "AI" systems since '50s).
Yeah, the bill has a cause - it recognizes some pain points. But then it haphazardly tries to address symptoms instead of underlying issues (environmental regulations, utility pricing, land use, job security), while pushing vaguely defined regulations that allow arbitrary application. As if misdirected measures and poorly defined laws aren't already a giant issue.
> I think they’d try to get something through Congress to regulate the industry in a rules-based way.
Is that a joke? We're back in a spat with Iran because Obama refused to engage with Congress, as required by our constitution, to enter the USA in any binding deal.
Any AI actions from the next admin is going to be executive yolos.
The what? More like "the whims of an eighty year old in cognitive decline and those wishing to curry or keep his favor" - quite an expansive definition of "political decision making".
It wasn’t. Biden largely didn’t do much. The trump administration does illegal things that get struck down in courts on a daily basis. We’re all very desensitized to it.
But yes, Biden was old and cognitively not well. But his “whims” didn’t exist much, and they were always fairly reasonable. Trump is the most unreasonable president, most likely in US history. I would even categorize Andrew Jackson as more restrained.
If you think that anthropic wasn't pushing aggressive regulatory capture legislation in the Biden administration, why do you think they hired a bunch of people from it?
What Anthropic was pushing for under Biden has very little to do with the values Republicans have been espousing (and failing to live up to) for decades. That's kind of the point op was making. Republicans run on small government but do not deliver it. Democrats do not run on small government. Democrat Presidents campaign on and push for things like the ACA, they don't have fun quips like, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”
A clear regulatory framework to operate within allows businesses to operate within it rather than get surprised by the King's whims upending their business on every few Fridays. If you expect regulation will eventually happen, pushing for it to happen on terms you're able to comply with rather than as haphazard surprises is pretty sensible.
It's very fashionable to hate on the current administration, despite what the previous administration was doing. That's reality and I'll be punished to hell for saying so.
If you don't want the current administration to be blindly hated, perhaps you should ask the president to stop publishing daily statements about how much he hates various people. You reap what you sow.
Again, you're seeing this as some kind of clever invariant of politics, but it's not. People are blind to politicians on their side because Donald Trump has spent the past 10 years working hard to make sure that everyone in politics is constantly enraged at the other side. You're being "punished to hell", in your words, because you're blaming Trump's passionate embrace of hatred-based politics on his opponents.
Ever since I've been conscious (the 80s), it's been the party of fear, violence and greed. They've consistently nominated actual clowns for positions of power. B-movie actor Ronald Reagan... Dan Quayle... Sarah Palin... the current, truly stunning iteration of absolute moral and intellectual bankruptcy TWICE after he killed hundreds of thousands of people due to COVID/vaccine skepticism and staged a violent attack on the capitol after losing a democratic election.
Free market? Small government? Big police state, trillions in defense contractor grift, unsustainable tax breaks to the wealthiest leading to massive spending deficits... all while doing everything to erode access to education, healthcare and basic services.
It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.
> It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.
People get quite a kick out of seeing people they don't like get hurt. They can stay entertained by that for a long time until it bites them.
Only now is it finally biting with the collapse of the rural medical clinics, the war induced spike in the price of gasoline, etc.
That's probably playing a big part in the seeming shift in the electorate in every election.
It tells me that the people who buy Republican politicians make money from selling Americans guns, and somebody with influence thinks they can make money by restricting LLM release.
They have affiliated themselves to him. Watch, within a month of Democrats being back in power they’ll be harping small government, denigrating the national debt they ballooned themselves. There’s no reason to help them attempt to disavow it.
> the entire party aggressively supporting him and everything he does.
That's untrue.
If you do some homework you will see Republican politicians and the Supreme Court disagreeing on a number of issues. Amongst Republican voters, his approval rating has been sliding and is now below 80% in most polls.
You have to remember that very very few voters agree/support everything their party does. If that wasn't the case, then not a single American voter is morally pure.
They passed one major piece of legislation since he took office and it was loaded with pork to get everyone onboard. I wouldn't call that aggressive. The Right is very fractured right now.
I can't tell if you're disingenuous or just ignorant. The Trump admin has been completely coopted by the pro-Israel lobby and Big Tech. He betrayed his entire base. He's ruling by executive fiat (EOs). Anyone that speaks out publicly for the original platform gets a primary challenger funded by Miriam Adelson or threats. See Thomas Massie, MTG, Lauren Boebert, etc. Are you paying attention at all? The Boomers watching Fox News propaganda in their nursing homes all day are not a reflection of party unity.
The Fox News boomers were pawns, but everyone knew that. Trump is a “money talks” kind of guy, that’s why people voted for him.
Yes that was shortsighted but it’s worked out well for trump. He can basically just… do whatever. Nobody needs to legislate, he’s essentially congress at this point.
Trump has an 87% approval rating amongst Republicans as of the last poll I can find.
While Trump is a megalomanic and does whatever he wants, he has the mandate of the Republican party, whose elected officials could choose at any moment to end this by withdrawing support.
The entire Republican party in all branches of government is supporting Trump. His politics and the Republican party politics are one and the same. The last election the party did not have a platform because, quite literally, they said that whatever Trump says _is_ their platform.
He's a Republican backed by the Republican establishment funded by Republican donors and massively influential in Republican primaries. Republicans voted him into power twice. Republicans pushed his voter fraud narrative. Republicans embraced his vaccine skepticism and killed countless Americans. Republicans voted for his ICE policies that murdered two citizens of my home state.
Republicans caused this disaster and are all, each and every, individually morally responsible for putting Trump in power.
Republican voters, Republican politicians, Republican donors and the Republican political machine.
They picked the losing side of history and they can sink with it.
Considering there's no such thing as a "free market" I've been laughing for a real long time. Markets require regulation and enforcement to function.
The US government was created to protect the interests of rich, white, male slave owners. And if you look at Louisiana State Penintentiary (often called "Angola"), which is essentialy a Southern plantation with forced labor, you realize not as much has changed as you might otherwise think.
> My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
While chattel slavery ended when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, slavery continued through debt bondage and convict leasing up until 1941 where FDR suddenly decided to aggressively prosecute the practice for fear of the Japanese using it for propaganda value. I'm referring to Circular 3591 [2]. And while that heavily curtailed abuse (eg by locking people up essentially indefinitely for "vagrancy" or imaged debts), forced prison labor continues to this day, including private companies profiting from prison labor.
Also, while the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the South arguably won. Reconstruction saw severe curtailment of newly-established civil rights for former enslaved people. And after Reconstruction came Jim Crow until the 1960s.
The point of slavery was money, and the point of money was power. By the time of the civil war the real power for the ruling class was coming from industrialization.