Kristofor Minta

We should be extremely clear about various red lines as we approach and/or cross them. We just got close to one of the biggest ones, and we could cross it as soon as a few days from now: the quasi-nationalization of a frontier lab. Of course, we don’t exactly call it that. The legal phraseology for the line we are approaching is “the invocation of the Defense Production Act (DPA) Title I on a frontier AI lab.” What is the DPA? It’s a Cold War era industrial policy and emergency powers law. Its most commonly used power is Title III, used for traditional industrial policy (price guarantees, grants, loans, loan guarantees, etc.). There is also Title VII, which is used to compel information from companies. This is how the Biden AI Executive Order compelled disclosure of certain information from frontier labs. I only mention these other titles to say that not all uses of the DPA are equal. Title I, on the other hand, comes closer to government exerting direct command over the economy. Within Title I there are two important authorities: priorities and allocations. Priorities authority means the government can put itself at the front of the line for arbitrary goods. Allocations authority is the ability of the government to directly command the production of industrial goods. Think, “Factory X must make Y amount of Z goods.” The government determines who gets what and how much of it they get. This is a more straightforwardly Soviet power, and it is very rarely used. This is the power DoD intends to use in order to command Anthropic to make a version of Claude that can choose to kill people without any human oversight. What would this commandeering look like, in practice? It would likely mean DoD personnel embedded within Anthropic exercising deep involvement over technical decisions on alignment, safeguards, model training, etc. Allocations authority was used most recently during COVID for ventilators and PPE, and before that during the Cold War. It is usually used during acute emergencies with reasonably clear end states. But there is no emergency with Anthropic, save for the omni-mergency that characterizes the political economy of post-9/11 U.S. federal policy. There’s no acute crisis whose resolution would mean the Pentagon would stop commandeering Anthropic’s resources. That is why I believe that in the end this would amount to quasi-nationalization of a frontier lab. It’s important to be clear-eyed that this is what is now on the table. The Biden Administration would probably have ended up nationalizing the labs, too. Indeed, they laid the groundwork for this in terms one. I discussed this at the time with fellow conservatives and I warned them: “This drive toward AI lab nationalization is a structural dynamic. Administrations of both parties will want to do this eventually, and resisting this will be one of the central challenges in the preservation of our liberty.” I am unhappy, but unsurprised, that my fear has come true, though there is a rich irony to the fact that the first administration to invoke the prospect of lab nationalization is also one that understands itself to have a radically anti-regulatory AI policy agenda. History is written by Shakespeare! There is a silver lining here: if Democrats had originated this idea, it would have been harder to argue against, because of the overwhelming benefit of the doubt conventionally extended to the left in our media, and because a hypothetical Biden II or Harris admin would done it in a carefully thought through way. So it is convenient, if you oppose nationalization, that it’s a Republican administration that first raised the issue—since conventional elite opinion and media will be primed against it by default— and that the administration is raising it in such an non-photogenic manner. This Anthropic thing may fizzle, and some will say I am overreacting. But this Anthropic thing may also *not* fizzle, and regardless this issue is not going away.

sometimes I’m engrossed in an empiricist-materialist frame of thinking & then I suddenly remember something like “the idea of the British empire was first articulated by an actual sorcerer”

Many college professors are discovering that students learn less when they have laptops open. Many of us are banning their use in class. Putting computers and tablets on students desks in K-12 may turn out to be among the costliest mistakes in the history of education

March 26, 6pm, at Stories Books & Cafe in L.A. an indy Asterism Revolution event

March 26, 6pm, at Stories Books & Cafe in L.A. an indy Asterism Revolution event