Transcription
AI is basically providing the tools of the revolution against AI, and the AI companies have done us a great favor of making this an immediate, visceral, visual threat. It's become increasingly part of the narrative that the dependence on the AI bubble is potentially going to take down our entire economy at some point. We're attaching ourselves to this fantasy. So, we're in a position where nobody wants to call BS on the bubble. At the same time, that bill's going to come due at some point.
>> Hi, I'm Isaac, and today on the Tech Report, I'm joined by journalist and writer of the Nerd Reich newsletter, Gild Duran. Thanks for coming on.
>> Thanks for having me.
A survey by Veracite found that 69% of Americans they surveyed were in favor of taking public ownership of half of AI tech firms. I just want to sort of get into the pros and cons of that in a minute, but just before we do, why would you say almost 70% of US citizens are in favor of this kind of action?
The AI companies have done a great job of terrifying the American people and turning them against this technology at a very rapid rate. AI companies are currently in the middle of a self-inflicted public relations apocalypse. They've essentially promised that they're going to kill all jobs and possibly wipe humanity off the face of the earth. And so it's not really a wonder why so many Americans have so quickly turned against this technology and learned to fear it and now seek to have the government take a greater hand in controlling it.
>> So would you say it's a reaction to the technology itself, or particularly the ideology and marketing that's gone around it, or even perhaps the physical infrastructure that is sort of very publicly impacting the local communities that it's being built in?
I think it's a mixture of all of those things. The technology itself, while people have used it for fun things like creating silly images or helping them to write letters or whatever, it has also been publicized for talking children into suicide, driving people into psychosis, being used to create child sex abuse material, and a host of other ills. At the same time, the overarching promise of AI is that it's going to completely disrupt the economy and leave most people without any kind of meaningful work. And at the same time, these things run on these massive data centers that are like an alien invasion of communities all over the country that come to suck up your water, pollute your air, destroy the peace of your town, and all for the promise of eventually killing your job and possibly wiping our species off the face of the planet if you believe the grimmest of the AI company fantasies that they're putting out there. So they've really created a cocktail of apocalyptic fear, and now we're seeing a strong political resistance begin to arise to that. All of it again, self-inflicted by the AI companies themselves.
>> Also, according to this survey, about 90% of respondents think that results of safety testing of AI should be public, publicly released. So, how much of this do you think comes down to the outlandish fears people have of AI that the companies themselves have kind of fostered, compared to sort of the less dramatic but perhaps much more real fears of AI that people have, like the environmental costs or the psychological harms that you've named, just to name a couple?
I think it's all of the above because I think the root of this is that people just don't trust AI companies, and they don't trust people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman and all the venture capitalists who are pushing this, shoving this technology down our throats as quickly as they can. So I think that's really at the root of this: that people don't have any trust for these companies or the technology, and they want the government to step in and do something about it. And so I think we're going to continue to see, you know, when do you have such a revolt against the conservative line that regulation is bad? You know, people want more than regulation. They want the government to take a strong hand in controlling this technology. And that makes a lot of sense when you consider the fact that, you know, we have this unique corporate industry that has emerged to promise this dark, potentially dark future in which everything gets destroyed. You rarely see an industry do anything like that. Industries usually promise to create jobs or improve safety. With AI, the gambit is basically, "Hey, we're going to play Russian roulette with your future and with your life and with the lives of your children, but don't worry. If we succeed, we'll make a lot of money and everything will be better." And that's just not a winning message. So, it's clear that the billionaires came up with this messaging on their own because no sane public relations person would ever recommend such a campaign or a strategy. And so the distrust is a direct result of that insane, unhinged, completely detached from reality messaging that has been the main sell of the AI industry to its investor class.
So if we get into some of the policy of it, there is a risk that by giving governments a 50% stake in AI, the companies that it may sort of harm regulation instead of helping regulation, especially in the context of a White House that might be willing to say risk public well-being for economic improvements. Do you think this kind of move would give more power to governments or make them more susceptible to the influence of big tech companies?
>> This is one of the major problems with trying to address this issue at this particular time. You know, American democracy is currently in a very unstable condition, and it's not really clear where we're headed. We may be on the cusp of something resembling an autocracy. We'll see if we have elections in a few months because that's a real question right now of whether Donald Trump is going to allow the elections to proceed without any kind of interference. Ultimately, you want a trustworthy democratic government that's strong to be able to manage and oversee and regulate this type of dangerous, disruptive technology. But if you were to concentrate that power in the hands of the Trump administration right now, that's the only thing that might possibly be worse than having it in the hands of Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and these other characters in the AI industry. So, it's a real conundrum. Ultimately, it's a good idea to have government more involved in something that promises to be so destructive potentially. Uh, at the same time, this is not the best moment to trust the federal government to do the right thing because it's in the grips of a fascist takeover where the idea basically, if you had Trump regulating it, any AI company could do whatever they wanted as long as they gave a few billion dollars to his family. That's how things are working in this country right now. So, it's a real conundrum because ultimately you need a strong and trustworthy government to handle these kinds of things. And in the United States right now, we are no longer a dependable democracy. And that's part of the tragedy of the moment.
>> I suppose with this kind of legislation, safeguards, whatever public ownership, whatever you would kind of want to call this kind of thing, it does come with the fact that it would not just be one government, one president. It would be across potentially a very long range of presidents. And so what would happen do you think in the short and long term if this did go ahead?
>> Right now, we're witnessing an unprecedented attempt by both AI companies and crypto companies to take control of the government by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the elections. So the question is whether our Congress and our White House can withstand this onslaught of AI and crypto money, or whether the billionaires of Silicon Valley are simply going to buy the politicians they want to enforce the regulations that they prefer, or to make it look like they're being regulated when they're not. You know, one of the problems with some of the proposals we're seeing is that the AI CEOs are the ones proposing them first, right? So, they're kind of beating everyone to the punch by saying, "Oh, we're going to pay everybody a dividend," or "Oh, we want to work with the government," or "Sell a share of our company to the government," etc. So, it's not exactly punishment. It's we're throwing them into the brier bush, and that's exactly what they're asking for to a certain extent. So I think the real question is going to be what impact this money has on the US political system. Whether politicians continue to accept the money and serve the billionaire donor class, or whether we have politicians who reject that and play directly to the unpopularity of AI and answer directly to the concerns of the majority of people who have made it clear they do not want to go down this road toward the proposed AI economic apocalypse.
Going back to the survey, 10% of those polled say that they think the regulatory proposals from these AI companies are for the protection of the public, compared to about 43% who said that it was protection for the corporate interests. Do you think that a public ownership of AI firms would actually address those fears in any way, or just make it more likely that corporate interests are more involved in regulatory decisions?
It would depend on how it's all structured, really. And I think that that 10% is really smart. That's how Washington works. The lobbyists often write the regulations, and if they don't write them from the beginning, then they certainly have a heavy hand in revising them. That's what the entire lobbying industry is based on. So I think it would really depend on how it was structured. And, you know, something that comes to mind is that people like Sam Altman and others often describe the AI race as the new Manhattan Project. But the Manhattan Project was a top-down, government-run, government-controlled project. The corporations were contractors acting under the authority of government, but, you know, with the requirement to maintain secrecy and basically follow orders. So if we were to do it like an actual Manhattan Project, AI would be something being developed by the government, like so many other technologies have been, rather than allowing these billionaires to run around racing to deploy these technologies to the public because they're chasing investor dollars and billion-dollar windfalls. So the incentives are very perverse, and if we were to take Altman at his word and do it like a Manhattan Project, it would look very different. This would be a public project controlled by the government rather than a privatized project that empowers this handful of billionaires to possibly become trillionaires. And so I think we're learning a big lesson in the United States about what happens when you privatize technologies that are purportedly so powerful they can change everything. It would seem like the American people think that we've made a big mistake here.
If you had the power to, or if you were advising the government AI tech companies, what sort of regulations or legislations would you want to see put in place to achieve maybe what this proposed 50% ownership is trying to achieve? Would you how would you go about it in a different way?
We need a lot more public control of this technology, given that it's being framed as a nuclear weapon that's going to detonate in all of our lives. That's the framing that the AI companies have put on it. We would not allow individual entrepreneurs to create new nuclear weapons in the private sector because that's too dangerous. That poses a threat to millions of people. Well, AI poses a threat, allegedly, to billions of people. So, it's not clear why this is not a public project. Now, this is not a fully fleshed-out proposal. What I'm saying is that historically, we do not allow private entrepreneurs to be in control of something that, by their own telling, is extremely dangerous to the point of being apocalyptic. So, I think that's really the key to it. We have outsourced too much public power to the private sector. And we see that with Elon Musk now floating over all of our countries like this malevolent entity, starting trouble, starting riots, turning off satellites in the middle of war zones, right? We have created a monster out of Silicon Valley. And I think that there's going to be a big appetite in the United States for reigning in that power. And I think that just as the Silicon Valley AI oligarchs were too stupid to realize that promising to kill everyone's job was going to engender a massive backlash, I think we're going to have a huge backlash against tech power privatizing public power in the way that we've seen. They're basically trying to swallow government whole right now. But I think the government and the people are going to have to strike back because if you look at the vision of Silicon Valley, it's not just that they want to control AI. They think AI is going to change the entire political dynamic of the globe, and that they're going to be in charge of that. But the people who should be in charge of that are the voters in a democracy. And so this is really a question of democracy versus oligarchy, and in many ways versus fascism. If you look at the way that these oligarchs are teaming up with the Trump administration and its egregious disregard for rules, laws, ethics, and the norms of democratic behavior. So, I think that's the deeper problem here: there's an imbalance of public power and private power. And if these AI moguls get their way, that will be a permanent imbalance that defines the rest of the 21st century.
>> So if we go back to sort of the public perception, how it's being seen by everybody. If we do, I do want to get onto the economic sort of madness of it all, but if we leave that aside for a moment, how much do you think people are sort of drawing the parallels between the mistakes that were made with social media and arguably the internet, and to what's happening now?
I think that's an important factor for some people, but I think most people are reacting to the immediacy of the problem they're seeing in their own lives: the data centers invading their communities, the chatbot addiction and the dangers that has wrought in terms of making life more polarized and ugly. And also, I think most of all, this overriding message that you're not going to have a job in two or three or 20 years. And I want to make clear, I don't fully buy into these AI company fantasies that that's what's going to happen. I think they're promising their investors this jobs apocalypse because that's the only way they can rationalize how they're somehow going to pay back all the investment they're demanding in this technology. But the message is out there, and people are taking it seriously. I mean, you've basically AI has been posed as an imminent existential threat to the majority of people in the country. And so, it's not a surprise that there would be this backlash. You know, I worked for a long time in politics. And in politics, you always promise to create more jobs. You never say, "Hey, if you elect me, I'm going to kill most of the jobs in this community." That would make you very unpopular and you would not get elected to any office with that. Yet this is the tack that the AI companies have taken. So I think it's more of an immediate, visceral reaction to perceived harm. You know, it can be extremely hard to get people to care about systemic future threats, and the AI companies have done us a great favor of making this an immediate, visceral, visual threat. You know, we've had a lot of layoffs in the past year or two that have been attributed directly to AI. That's scaring the hell out of people. And so, AI is basically providing the tools of the revolution against AI with these terrifying realities that it seems to be putting everywhere. Now, some people say those were not AI-caused layoffs. That that's just the excuse companies are using. But it's having this effect of amplifying this message that this is a very threatening and dangerous technology. Not because it's going to destroy all humankind, which is part of the apocalyptic fantasy, but because it's going to make you unemployed in a few years. You're not going to be able to feed your family. That's the apocalypse for most normal people.
So if we do take a look at the economics, it's quite a macro scale, but how do you think the just the incomprehensibly large sums of money being balanced on this AI gamble is playing in the minds of people? Or is it just like you say, coming down to that, like this is my livelihood and it's going to take that?
I'm not worried about the AI bubble. I'm not worried about the trillion, the billion. I don't understand those numbers. I mean, I don't understand those numbers, and I spend a lot of time reading those numbers.
>> I think it's confusing to people why we would invest so much money in something that has the potential for so much harm, according to the people who are most enthusiastic about promoting it. And it's become increasingly part of the narrative that the dependence on the AI bubble is potentially going to take down our entire economy at some point. We're attaching ourselves to this fantasy. This is what's buoying our markets, this AI growth. Here in California, there's been a lot of revenue into the state system because of AI companies. So, we're in a position where nobody wants to call BS on the bubble. At the same time, that bill is going to come due at some point, and people are going to be very angry, and they're going to be looking for a scapegoat. Look at how the government funding for people during the pandemic resulted in inflation, and then it's become the blame game of who's the inflation, who caused the inflation. Well, we all did by making a collective choice to not have the economy collapse during the pandemic lockdown. So, but you can't really explain that to people later. And we have a political system where it becomes a blame game. And so, I think politicians, both on the right and on the left, are understanding that we're going to come to a point where AI companies are more than just vilified. They're actively hated and blamed for the destruction of our economy. So the question is how we can get out of this system where we're constantly jumping from bubble to bubble, the rich people getting as rich as possible, and everyone else being left holding the bag in the end. We saw this in 2008 with the housing market collapse, and it seems like we're headed in the same direction. There's a lot of imaginary thinking. There's a lot of math that doesn't add up unless you're the person who's going to be able to cash out and get your bag of money while everyone else is just left in the ruins. And that's a lot of how venture capital works. If they can get everybody to believe this valuation and cash out at the top, who cares what happens after that? They've got mansions all over the world. And so I think we're getting a hard lesson in what happens when you allow venture capital-funded enterprises and Silicon Valley moguls to decide how to run the economy. It's all monopoly money to them because they're already rich. So they're taking a huge risk with everyone else's livelihood, and the bill for that is going to come due at some point.
>> So say the AI bubble does pop, and I want to go back to the public ownership stuff. What if public ownership has happened and American people own 50% of the AI firms? Would that help in the case that the AI bubble pops, or would it just leave the public picking up the tab on the overbuild of AI data centers?
>> I think Senator Sanders is coming from a good place with his proposal. You know, he's trying to make sure that we don't have a future where a handful of oligarchs own all of the value that may be created by AI companies. At the same time, I think perhaps he's bought in a little too deeply to the mythology of the AI companies. You know, he recently had this chat with Claude that was on video, as if Claude's a person. This is another one of those framings that a lot of people reject. You're talking to a text prediction large language model. You're not talking to a conscious entity. But for a lot of people, at a certain age especially, it seems really hard to explain to them how this works and how it's harmful to treat AI as if it's a human being and to believe in that particular myth. So I do think I question whether we're rushing into this idea of tying ourselves completely and permanently to the AI companies, and is there a way to structure something so that we're not left on the hook and become partners in this technology which is either going to save us all and lead us to utopia, or destroy us all and lead us to apocalypse. You know, I, so, so for me, it's a question. I don't, you know, I assume that Senator Sanders has done a lot of research to try to figure out how to make sure the AI companies don't get away with everything. At the same time, it's not clear that they're really going to generate all of that value, and that we're not headed toward being partners with them in some kind of debt or collapse. So, for me, the jury is still out on the wisdom of tying ourselves so closely to the fate of the AI companies. There must be another way, not right now, to do that that is, um, that exposes us, the American people, to less liability and maintains a skepticism about whether AI companies are actually going to do all of the things that they say they're going to do. You know, the moment that the public owns 50% of the AI companies, well, then I guess that means we have to let all the data centers happen, and we have to, you know, this is a technology that was built on a massive theft of everyone's intellectual property and creativity. And basically, we're being told that, you know, now we get a $1,000 check every year in return for that. But what is $1,000 going to buy you in 10 or 20 years? You know, a cup of coffee, maybe. We're not really sure. Uh, and especially in an economy where, if this thing works out supposedly, according to the AI company mythology, large numbers of people won't have jobs. A thousand bucks ain't even going to pay the rent for a month. So, there's some things here that still don't add up. And I think we're going to see some pretty strong debate over whether this is a good idea. I think it comes from a good place. I think Senator Sanders is trying to think ahead, but it does seem to buy into the AI company mythology that this is all inevitable, that it's all going to happen, and we better sign up for a small share of it now or be left behind. And that's the basic message across the AI industry: "If you don't do this right now, you're going to miss out." But we're already seeing a collapse in that narrative, right? All right, we're already seeing that AI can't just replace all the people, and it'll hallucinate errors into your work product, and it's actually not that great yet, and it's not clear that it will ever be that great. I'm not saying it has no value for anything. I just don't understand why this technology is being framed as the thing that's going to eat everything else, and there'll be no work left for humans because we'll just all be doing what instead? Typing prompts, typing prompts into machines in exchange for crypto. I don't, that seems to be the vision of some people in Silicon Valley.
>> And just finally, I kind of want to get your take on the the character arc, as it were, of big tech. Not too long ago, sort of two, certainly three decades ago, they were sort of the bastions of independent thought and bringing power to the people and democratizing that. All the money and the power. But that seems to have kind of changed quite significantly, certainly in the last few years at the very least. And I was just wondering if, like, what you think happens next. Do you think that perception is now well and truly buried, and how impactful that is for the companies themselves to have this sort of declining opinion?
Well, I'm glad you asked because I've just written a book on that very subject, "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy," which looks at how these extreme right-wing ideologies formed in Silicon Valley and then spread to become the dominant meme of Silicon Valley in the past few years. And I would say that the seeds of authoritarian, fascist thinking were always present in Silicon Valley over the past few decades. You always had this idea, you know, a lot of Ayn Rand worship, the idea that people who are good at technology don't need other people and shouldn't have to live under the rules of the government and would be able to escape from democratic rule in the future using technology and wealth, which is largely where we are now. And for some of these billionaires, as I write, their vision for at least 30 years has been that two technologies would completely disrupt the 21st century and allow them to overcome democracy and basically undermine nations, which would then collapse. And the book was called "The Sovereign Individual," which was written by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. And the two technologies that it said would cause this destruction were cryptocurrency, they called it cybercurrency, but cryptocurrency, and advanced automation, basically AI. And so that's where we are now. The book also predicted there'd be a massive, violent public backlash against these changes, and it seems like a lot of the oligarchs in Silicon Valley are trying to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy, even as we speak.
>> Well, Gilderan, thanks for taking the time.
>> Thanks for having me.
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