2024 is the worldwide year of elections, but the United States has deserved all the fixed attention that it has received in the past few weeks.
Among other events, unusual moves from the AI industry symbolize the end of U.S. “modern conservatism” as it once was and the beginning of something different – perhaps centrist. Economist Noah Smith describes the shift:
Elon Musk, who said in March that he had no plans to donate to any political campaign, has now committed to giving $45 million a month to a pro-Trump super PAC. Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz also announced that they’re donating to Trump, as did sometime tech investor Bill Ackman. The news is now filled with a flurry of stories about how the tech industry is turning to the right.
Musk founded OpenAI and now runs X-AI. The VC firm Andreessen Horowitz is arguably the leader of the AI accelerationist New Left. In 2023, they penned the controversial manifesto Why AI Will Save the World. Later that year, Ben Horowitz described his political ideology as myopic: “We are non-partisan, one-issue voters: if a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.” Smith, by contrast, believes the general trend to be caused by many factors: fear of taxes and regulation, fear of antitrust in particular, Democrats’ treatment of crypto, negative polarization from liberals, anticipation of a public backlash against DEI and the “cancel culture” era, and Asian and Jewish ethnic issues.
Whatever the causes, “Trumpism” is peeling off members of the AI accelerationist New Left. However, the left-right distance they’ve travelled is not as great as it may seem. Trump himself may be a “moderate authoritarian weirdo”, but his rise has coincided with the end of modern conservatism in the United States. Trump now leads a far more classically centrist movement than the old U.S. Republican party.
The Technological Failure of U.S. Conservatism
An interesting article from late 2022 eerily describes the failure of conservatism in the United States. Assistant professor Jon Askonas (The Catholic University of America) writes:
“Tradition” … was a usefully empty category, evoking scriptural wisdom for religious conservatives, the Constitution for anti-Communists, and emergent market orders for libertarians.
But … the conservative defense of tradition has failed—not because the right lost the battle of ideas, but because technological change has dissolved the contexts in which traditions once thrived. A technological society can have no traditions.
[The modern conservatism] movement failed because it neglected the true revolutionary principle: technological transformation. Conservatives “lost the culture” not because they lost the battle of ideas, but because they lost the economy.
The digital era has ushered in a further phase of the technological destruction of tradition…. Training on the collective efforts of thousands of years of culture, machine-learning algorithms aim to supplant human performance for classification, writing, drawing, coding, driving, making music, and a host of other practices…. The increased power to simulate human culture goes alongside the increasing availability, searchability, and profitability of “intellectual property” (the detritus of past popular culture), such that continued production of new culture and art has become optional.
Those who look to build a human future have been freed from a rearguard defense of tradition to take up the path of the guerrilla, the upstart, the nomad. We can bid farewell with fondness to the modern defenders of tradition….
We can no longer conserve. So we must build and rebuild and, therefore, take a stand on what is worth building.
Less U.S. AI Safety Regulation; Big Tech Remains Democratic
What does this mean for AI politics under a potential Trumpist regime?
First, the U.S. President has a free hand in foreign affairs, and this is Smith’s dire conclusion:
[T]he main Trump policy that should scare the heck out of tech would be giving China a green light to take Taiwan. In recent interviews, Trump has talked about abandoning the island to Chinese invasion. If that happened, it [would] cut the U.S. tech industry off from most of its supply of computer chips. In an age when AI is the main force powering growth in the tech sector, that would be a heavy blow, since AI requires huge and growing numbers of TSMC chips to continue advancing.
Second, Smith’s advice to Democrats would be heard loudly in the event of a Trump Presidency. That advice includes “Be smarter about tech regulation, and back off of the ‘AI safety’ stuff”, as well as redirecting antitrust away from Silicon Valley and saying lots of nice things about the tech industry. Expect the educated classes leading a defeated Democratic party to follow that advice, and to give more political attention to the tech giants and to revolutionary, trans-humanist ideals in the kinds of biotech and pure AI research carried out at Google et al.
Finally, if they win the Presidency, expect the new centrist Republican party to cater to Askonas’ “those who look to build a human future”, and to integrate those ideas together with techno-optimism, libertarian principles, and populist appeal. Think widespread commercial AI adoption, private space flight, reshored manufacturing, and government adoption of blockchain privacy programs.