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

"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?

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.

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.

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