> This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.
Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
We regulate medicine, nuclear technology, television, movies, monopolies, energy, financial services, etc. because these things can be harmful if left solely to the market. Americans value honest work, dignity, prosperity and equal opportunity. Innovation is useful in so far as it enables our values - regulation is not counter to Americans interests, it protects them.
Rubyfan mentioned nuclear technology, which like cryptography, has a broad scope and military applications so isn’t something that was just left to the market to decide the best fit.
I don’t think I’ve left the scope of this discussion.
I was more talking about the consumer radiation side. Radium water to drink, women licking and painting radium watch dials. Toy physics kits for kids with uranium in it. Uranium glass also isn't great.
I mean the radium fad just by itself was pretty crazy, people used radium suppositories and radium makeup.
Ah I see. Thats definitely a case of regulations written in blood. I do think it strengthens the argument that we shouldn’t wait for wide spread adoption to cause problems, but rather study the issue and limit exposure until safety is at last vaguely known.
With AI, I don’t think there will be a lot of needed regulation until it gets to AI controlling physical machines like self driving cars. But in that respect, we already began regulating before problems appeared.
It’s a lot harder to put the genie back in the bottle once out.
AI is already hurting people. We need regulation to hold it and its benefactors accountable. The federal government is preempting states from doing so.
I don't think you realize the level of damage it generally takes to get bipartisan support for creation of an oversight body.
It was popularized that an estimated 8,000 infant deaths attributed to swill milk occured every year in NYC in the 1850s (take with a grain of salt).
Even more recently much of the banking regulation only occured after severe market issues that broadly impacted the economy.
On a related note: "Layoffs" are going to be a hard practical harm point to rally around. Unless we fundamentally change the nature of our economy (Which doesn't tend to happen until the previous system collapses.), effeciency is king. Tha market isn't rational, but effeciency is a competitive advantage that compounds over time. So you have a prisoners dilemma here. If you want to restrict a technology that boosts efficiency, you either have to close your market and then put up rules that constrain efficiency or you bleed your prosperity.
Sure. And this is not that. This says: before we begin to think about our policy let's make sure to remove any barriers for Mr. Altman and friends so that they don't get sucked down with their Oracle branded boat anchor.
If this had any whiff of actually shedding light on these needed regulations the root OP wouldn't have said what they did. But for now I'm going to head over to Polymarket and see if there are any bets I can place on Trump's kids being appointed to the OpenAI board.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
Where did you get the idea that this was the cause that created millions of jobs and lead to the US running the world's largest economy, and not say - the knock-on effects of the US joining WW2 relatively late and unscathed, making it the only major world power left with a functioning enough industrial complex to export to war-ravaged Europe?
I see your point, but that is definitely not the only cause of American economic dominance. The U.S. has been the largest economy by GDP since ca 1900 – i.e. before the wars.
Not true that US is 100% gas pedal constantly on innovation. You’re forgetting labor reform movements and the service switch away from industry in the last few decades. Also the de-science-ing of the current admin has vastly reduced our innovative capacity, as well as the virtual decapitation of brain drain. Those next generation of brightest immigrants certainly aren’t coming here to deal with ICE, and that’s been the source of half the great minds in our country throughout its history, gone because of racism.
I kind of doubt American scientists will leave en masse to go elsewhere. Their options are only Europe, the UK, or China. Most will not be willing to give up the salaries or the resources available to scientists in the USA, even with the current administration, to go live in strongly hierarchical academic systems that they don’t know how to navigate. Especially not for a 30% salary reduction (or more if they go someplace like France or Italy).
Reread what the previous poster said. They were talking about folks coming to the US. Around 50% of doctorate level scientists and graduate students in STEM come from outside the US.
Canada? Australia? 30% (or more) salary cut certainly applies but academic systems are similar and resources are in the same ballpark at top research universities.
They don't have to go anywhere if they just don't come here. American science works on the back of underpaid foreign born graduate students. If they aren't there, neither is American science. It's already started. And that's not even considering the other 'reforms' currently deliberately crushing academia. The first thing a new fascist regime needs to crush is the immigrants, and the second is academia. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/graduate-studen...
The case against this EO is not “banning new technology”. It’s not allowing the federal government to ban any state regulation. And states having the power to make their own rules is maybe the most American value.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption
Until that "innovation and disruption" threatens any established player, at which point they run crying to the government to grease some palms. China is innovating and disrupting the entire energy sector via renewables and battery storage while the US is cowering in the corner trying to flaccidly resuscitate the corpse of the coal industry.
Maybe it should be. The system here in the US has produced some great innovations at the cost of great misery among the non-wealthy. At a time when technology promises an easier life, it only seems to benefit the wealthy, while trying to discard everyone else. The light at the end of the tunnel is a 1%-er about to laughingly crush you beneath their wheels.
I don't think this is the strongest argument. Every technological revolution so far has initially benefited the wealthy and taken a generation or two for its effects to lift the masses out of previous levels of poverty, but ultimately each one has.
To me the stronger argument about AI is that this revolution won't. And that's because this one is not really about productivity or even about capital investment in things that people nominally would want (faster transport, cheaper cotton, home computers). This one is about ending revolution once and for all; it's not about increeasing the wealth of the wealthy, it's about being the first to arrive at AGI and thus cementing that wealth disparity for all perpetuity. It's the endgame.
I don't know if that's true, but that's to me the argument as to why this one is exceptional and why the capitalist argument for American prosperity is inapplicable in this case.
I don't know about for all perpetuity. If history has shown, anyone that reaches the pinnacle eventually becomes complacent, technology improves by becoming faster/cheaper/smaller. That just means it is prime to always be susceptible to a new something coming along that stands on the shoulders of what came before without having to pay for it. They start where the current leader fought to achieve.
So has America. But the definition of poverty is not absolute positioned, to borrow a CSS analogy. Poverty gets defined relative to wealth. Overall, this is a good thing. But knowing that your poverty is rich compared to the poverty of two generations ago doesn't satisfy humans who gauge their relative social position and are unhappy with it.
Have you ever seen one who was starving? Do they lack access to clean drinking water? Are there malnourished children, without access to schools, begging in America?
Have you ever been to a country where there was extreme poverty?
When people talk about China eliminating extreme poverty, that has a specific international definition. From Wikipedia:
Extreme poverty is the most severe type of poverty, defined by the United Nations (UN) as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services". Historically, other definitions have been proposed within the United Nations.
Extreme poverty mainly refers to an income below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day in 2018 ($2.66 in 2024 dollars), set by the World Bank.[0]
The average homeless person in America spends several times that amount on drugs, and all of the above services are available to them. Homelessness in America is a societal failure, but it does not meet the definition of extreme poverty.
I don’t know about that. The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America. While American capitalism has many faults, oppressing the bottom quintile is not one of them. The US median income is consistently top ten globally.
Median income doesn't tell much if you don't factor in the cost of living. My salary sucks compared to what I would earn in America, but when I factor in things like free healthcare, daycare and higher level education, I'm better off here.
The US does a good job of selling the idea of living here and getting rich, though it does a better job of selling it to people who aren't already embedded in daily life in the US. While we have, perhaps, much lower numbers of extreme poverty compared to a lot of countries, as one of the richest countries, and growing richer by the day, we should have zero extreme poverty. The people with the will to fix our poverty lack the money and very few with money have no real desire to help the less fortunate.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption
Arguably true, but it's also been way ahead of the pack (people tend to forget this) on protection for organized labor, social safety net entitlements, and regulation of harmful industrial safety and environmental externalities.
The patent system. I know someone will respond detailing why the patent system is pro-business, but it is objectively government regulation that puts restrictions on new technology, so it's proof that regulation of that sort is at least an American tradition if not fully an "American value".
Patents and trademarks are the only ways to create legal monopolies. They are/were intended to reward innovation but despite good intentions are abused.
Not exactly. For example, Major League Baseball has been granted an anti-trust exemption by the US Supreme Court, because they said it was not a business. In some cases in which firms have been found guilty of violating the anti-trust laws, they were fined amounts minuscule in relation to the profits they gained by operating the monopoly. Various governments in the US outsource public services to private monopolies, and the results have sometimes amounted to a serious restraint of trade. The chicanery goes back a long way. For the first decade or so after the passage of the Sherman Act, it was not used against the corporate monopolies that it was written to limit; it was invoked only against labor unions trying to find a way to get a better deal out of the firms operating company stores and company towns etc, etc.
Then Teddy Roosevelt, the so-called trust-buster, invoked it under the assumption that he could tell the difference between good and bad monopolies and that he had the power to leave the good monopolies alone. 120 years later, we are in the same sorry situation.
Intellectual property restrictions cause harm even when used as intended. They are an extreme rest restriction on market activity and I believe they cause more harm than good.
Patents, trademarks, copyright, deeds and other similar concepts are part of what makes capitalism what it is, without them capitalism will not work because they are the mechanisms that enforce private property.
Good luck with that. When 3/4 of the world laughs at your patent what is the point of patents? IP only works when everyone agrees to it. When they don't it's just a handicap on the ones who do that benefits nobody.
> Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Copyright law is another counter-example to your argument. But somehow? that’s no longer a concern if you have enough money. I guess the trick is to steal from literally everyone so that no one entity can claim any measurable portion of the output as damages.
I’ve always thought Copyright should be way shorter than it is, but it’s suspect that we’re having a coming to Jesus moment about IP with all the AI grifting going on.
Copyright has nothing to do with banning technology. It is a set of rules around a particular kind of property rights.
There are things you can do with technology that are banned as a result of copyright protections, but the underlying technologies are not banned, only the particular use of them is.
The question isn’t the jobs created but how have workers benefited from increased productivity? They haven’t materially since late 1970s. That’s when the American labor movement began its decline. Innovation isn’t what helps workers. The gains from innovation have to be wrenched from the hands of the ruling class through organized resistance.
I think your take is historically accurate. Although one does wonder how long we'll be able to get away with keeping the pedal to the metal. It might be worth taking a moment to install a steering wheel. Rumor has it there are hazards about.
Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.