Brianna Lyman writes for the Federalist about Democrats’ coordinated approach toward artificial intelligence concerns.
Democrats’ newest existential threat has arrived and, amazingly, all of the party’s leading figures seemingly discovered it at the same time!
Over the past few days, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Hakeem Jeffries, and Ro Khanna have begun warning that AI is advancing fast, could be dangerous, and may require international treaties or regulatory oversight or a development moratorium or even a full-on government shut down.
Maybe these are all fair points that all the aforementioned Democrats coincidentally came up with on their own and just happened to reach the same conclusion as their fellow counterparts — or maybe the talking points went out.
AI is “gambling with our lives” — so said Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon pertaining to OpenAI and Anthropic. Coxen said that both are acting irresponsibly and are “racing straight to self-improving super intelligence.”
Coxon went so far as to say the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
It’s a scary warning. Maybe it’s true! Maybe it’s partially true and partially false. Either way, Democrats in recent days have suddenly become extremely concerned about AI.
ABC News reported that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the Democrat caucus planned to meet and a “high priority will be action on artificial intelligence.”
The New York Times headlined a piece noting that “Obama Urges Democrats to Move A.I. Oversight to the Center of Their Agenda.”
Some Democrats and Democrat-adjacent leaders have already adopted a similar stance. California Rep. Ro Khanna told Playbook “We need to ban self-improving AI and need a federal regulatory AI agency to prevent catastrophic harm.”
Meanwhile, former Vice President Kamala Harris said on X: “The frontier of artificial intelligence is advancing at an alarming speed. Over the weekend, industry leaders voiced support for an idea that the American people and many AI researchers in their own labs have been calling for: We must responsibly slow the pace of frontier AI development. A slowdown is critical in order to ensure AI serves the public interest.”
