AI First: How the Federal Government Is Prioritizing AI over People and Planet

https://stopgreedbuildgreen.climateandcommunity.org/posts/ai-first

by eatox • 19 days ago

32 24 19 days ago

stopgreedbuildgreen.climateandcommunity.org

goatlover3• 19 days ago

And it's not the only thing being prioritized over people and planet, although it's related to ongoing promotion of fossil fuels and wars, along with increased political propaganda.

baq• 19 days ago

The optimist in me sees AI as a path to fusion thus having the energy to undo at least some of the damage done via co2 sequestration etc.

The pessimist in me sees every other outcome

wrl• 19 days ago

How exactly is AI a "path to fusion"?

Marha012• 19 days ago

Advanced AI could be very useful for science and engineering tasks. AI-accelerated fusion R&D will achieve success sooner than without AI.

FloorEgg• 19 days ago

1. Containment requires realtime adjustments to control fields which benefit from very powerful specialized machine learning models.

2. Designs require advanced simulations which benefit from AI both in building the simulations and running them.

3. Material science benefits from models learning how particles interact and materials behave in certain conditions so we can predict which materials are worth producing.

These are odd the top of my head and I'm not a fusion physicist. There's probably a lot more examples.

sandeepkd• 19 days ago

There is a somewhat of organic path to it. Keeping the feelings of optimism or pessimism aside, destruction is a part of any cycle. The good thing is, there is this inherent self sustaining nature of the species and it would use the second opportunity better after such an event.

lacy_tinpot5• 19 days ago

"We believe that AI’s emergence shows the potential for state capacity to be oriented toward a different mission that centers the ambitious creation of socially useful green infrastructure like clean energy, healthy schools, libraries, social housing, and public transit."

The basic problem that left leaning politics are refusing to address is that the above were radical propositions. Schools, libraries, social housing, public transit, were all things that were fundamentally subversive, technologically revolutionary, and disruptive.

The failure here is that the technological revolutions since should have been a wake-up call for the progressive/liberal/left leaning politics to update priors, but instead there's a conservatism that has ingrained itself as a reaction to the technological revolutions since. The left leaning politics of today remains the same politics of the 19th and 20th century with the same rhetoric and discourse. It's frozen in time, and wants to conserve the politics of that era.

What would a left liberal politics look like if it were updated with the technological fundamentals of today?

Avicebron• 19 days ago

"The basic problem that left leaning politics are refusing to address is that the above were radical propositions. Schools, libraries, social housing, public transit, were all things that were fundamentally subversive.."

Subversive to what? A winner-take-all, might-makes-right feudal mindset?

lacy_tinpot5• 19 days ago

It was subversive to the ruling class, and the politics of that time. Schools for example made books accessible to everyone, where only 'elites' had access to them before. Thereby leveling the playing field.

A left leaning politics of today might actually ask for more compute or intelligence to be accessible to all.

Nationalizing or demanding a democratized project for frontier level intelligence that's easily accessible to all Americans, for example might be an idea.

This would be in direct competition with frontier labs that are all closed source and heavily funded. It would give access to people otherwise gated due to monetary reasons. And further give individual American an opportunity to participate in a coming social/technological transformation.

add-sub-mul-div• 19 days ago

So you think a philosophy needs to welcome all change in order to be coherent, and that there's an inconsistency to promoting things you believe are positive while opposing things you believe are negative?

Marha012• 19 days ago

It is a pretty unlikely proposition that AI progress will be a net negative, especially over the long term. There is no great technology in the history of mankind that was a net negative. Even for the more controversial ones, like internal combustion engines or nuclear power, the pros still far outweight the cons. Why should AI be different?

lacy_tinpot5• 19 days ago

Well... No. I'm saying that's generally the position of conservatism/right wing/authoritarian politics.

A left leaning politics does not just address the change, or accept change as is, but fundamentally invents the change. It is the revolutionary movement that leverage modernity, that is to say newness, your scientific revolutions, your enlightenment ideals, etc. to create new politics. Politics that are emancipatory.

The left is supposed to be a politics of historical invention. Using modernity to create new institutions, new rights, new publics, and new forms of collective life. Contemporary American left-liberal politics has become largely defensive and curatorial instead.

In other words the left generally invents the future, and dictates the changes in politics, that's what makes it 'progressive', that's why it's against reactionary politics.

So I'm saying the left leaning politics of today has fallen prey to closed, diminutive, reactionary politics, and there is new real new left politics that's inventing anything. At least not in America.

There was a glimmer with early technology, but the left rejected that politics in favor for stale institutionalism (the same ones from the 19th and 20th century), and ceded that technological ground to techno-fascists/rightwing/authoritarian/etc.etc. politics.

goatlover3• 19 days ago

The economics and politics remain the same. Do we want to allow massive wealth disparity and fascist policies to prevail, while social safety nets and civil rights are dismantled? Technology doesn't change that.

lacy_tinpot5• 19 days ago

If the progressives and liberals are arguing that there is no longer any change in politics, then I think perhaps you've become conservatives/reactionary.

impossiblefork• 19 days ago

Left-leaning politics is not at all like early 1900eds left-leaning politics.

Left-leaning politics has moved to very mild, not-even-social-democracy policies, taxation of wage income, a decreased focus on capital owners.

Left-leaning politics has thus been transformed beyond belief and has very little to do with what it used to. Most politicians have no idea about physical reality, which is the ultimate source of technology, but live sometimes in a world of administration, sometimes in a world of laws and sometimes in a world of politics only.

Left-liberals don't exist. Liberalism is a right-wing ideology: free trade, laissez-faire.

So I don't understand at all what you mean. What are the SocDems who have gone from being SocDems to not knowing what social democracy is and who now think about things like welfare and administrative stuff and living in a world of compromises attached to?

I can't see that they're attached to anything, and I think I despise them for it. At least someone who looks back to the past can look at it and critique it and see what ideas were valuable, what the real goals were, that led to different positive achievements.

lacy_tinpot5• 19 days ago

"Left-liberals don't exist"

This is straight out of the 19th and 20th century. Like old-socialist rhetoric (emphasis on the old). Even the revolutionary politics is basically a conservative regurgitation of the 19th and 20th century. Like this is de facto how the socialists and communists have always thought about the liberals and even enlightenment era thinkers, accusing the entire project of fascism, Western European imperialism, and so on.

It's almost like a caricature of the 19th and 20th century at this point.

There is no new politics. No new frontiers. Nothing new. Even as the entire world has completely changed, and the ground completely shifted.

bpodgursky4• 19 days ago

The federal government believes that the US will be locked out of the future forever if we are not first, or at least at parity, on AI with adversaries. They believe it is not a normal technology, but a singularly important one which will define national capacity.

The federal government believes that if China achieves AI dominance and we are not competitive on either the industrial or cognitive stacks, the people and planet will be at the whim of China and will not do better anyway (and come on — look at how China's fishing fleets treat the parts of the world they have unrestricted access to).

You can disbelieve it, but that is a perfectly valid thesis.

goatlover3• 19 days ago

This is a narrative framing from the tech companies who started and continue the AI race. The current administration is following this framing because the tech billionaires helped them get elected, so they are getting their pay back. It's crony capitalism.

bpodgursky4• 19 days ago

I do not work at an AI company. If you gave me a magic button, I would press it to halt all frontier AI development globally.

But, I do not have that button, and I believe the thesis that for the US to thrive, or even survive, we have to win at AI. So, until we get a multinational pact to pause AI (which I would support), it needs to be all gas, all the time.

SiempreViernes2• 19 days ago

I prefer to think that all compute Open AI has access too was actually given to Altman by Santa because he was once a good boy. "You can disbelieve it, but that is a perfectly valid thesis."

Do you see how putting "it's a perfectly valid thesis" at the end of any completely unsupported claim doesn't actually make it any more credible?

bpodgursky4• 19 days ago

Do you have a brain tumor or something? I genuinely don't understand what point you are trying to make.

AI First: How the Federal Government Is Prioritizing AI over People and Planet

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