excerpt - At a fundamental level, artificial intelligence leaders, evangelists and their allies want you to believe that their novel technology demands a novel political approach.
Calls for self-regulation from the chief executives of Anthropic, OpenAI and other such companies rest on the idea that the A.I. labs and their funders are the only people equipped to handle and regulate this potentially dangerous technology. This is why, for example, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, recently called <https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier#:~:text=industry%2Dwide%20coordination> for antitrust waivers to allow “industrywide coordination” around A.I. As my colleague Tressie McMillan Cottom observed <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/19/opinion/ai-hugging-face-big-tech-danger.html> in a recent column, the ostentatious panic around the prospect of superintelligent A.I. seems to cash out, politically, in a call to abdicate democratic authority to the companies in question. “They want us to panic, instead of seriously deliberating at the polls, in community meetings and in Congress,” she writes. “Panic is chaos without direction, affect set free from the discipline of curiosity, debate and accountability.” Even potential regulation is framed <https://nypost.com/2026/09/13/us-news/speaker-johnson-says-ai-leaders-must-meet-with-congress-on-safety-laws-after-end-of-humanity-warnings/> as a collaboration between government and the A.I. companies rather than a relationship of oversight and control. It is noteworthy, too, that as framed by these leaders, the conversation around A.I. safety is more about science-fictional scenarios and future apocalypses — rooted in a set of questionable assumptions about the nature of intelligence, among other things — than it is about more immediate concerns like the impact of A.I. on jobs, mental health and the environment. But novel technologies do not actually require novel political solutions, especially when those technologies either evoke, replicate or recapitulate age-old problems of political and economic life. There is, in fact, an American tradition of fighting to bring collective and democratic authority to bear on disruptive technologies — of using politics to try to shape and direct the impact of major economic transformations. full article - *https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/opinion/ai-politics-railroads-history.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/opinion/ai-politics-railroads-history.html>* -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43491): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43491 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121393244/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
