Aether - 🤖/acc

We might be heading towards a populist backlash towards AI, but we're not there yet. Outside the tech bubble, Americans really don't care about AI yet. AI is Americans' 29th most important issue, according to the fantastic survey @davidshor ran that everyone is rightly looking at. It's not surprising that Americans will answer sentiment questions about AI negatively, as they've been negative towards tech for a while. But it's a big leap from negative sentiment to meaningful political action. Americans have been negative on social media for 10 years, and there has been no meaningful political action. And that's despite all the other hallmarks of backlash people are saying about AI---violent extremists (people forget there was a shooting at YouTube HQ), protests, etc. My prediction: we will get real populist backlash to AI when the unemployment moves by, say, 2 percentage points and people see it as caused by AI. That might happen quite soon. So it's good that people are already thinking about this issue and where it might lead (esp @jasminewsun whose recent writing on this has been incredible). When the populist backlash does occur, people will be searching around for policies, and if we're lucky and smart, we'll have a library of potential good ideas ready to deploy. Because otherwise, we'll get horrible ideas like data center moratoria instead. I'll be writing more about this for my piece on the poltical economy of AGI next week!