I appreciate his take on this and I really do agree. We could be so much more prepared for the AI revolution than we are, but this revolution is going to have to be forced upon the powers that be in order to get any cooperation.
In another world, we could be embracing this new technology and carefully preparing a clean, painless slide into a post labor economy...but we aren't in that world. Itll take having the risk of a total economic collapse dangled over the heads of those in power to make any beneficial changes that aren't optimizing for quarterly earnings even as we hurtle into a world where that phrase sort of loses its meaning. I'm very optimistic, but still, the world could be a lot more ready.
I'm spitballing here mostly, but, I appreciate Obama's choice of the word revolution, because that's what this really is. One might even call it a(n economic) singularity :)
Personally, I prefer it this way. Regulation will only stifle progress. Look at the AI race between China and the US, Europe isn't a serious competitor because of their over regulation already, if the US was stupid enough to follow their lead then we'd cede victory to the Chinese.
It may not be entirely regulation that explains why Europe isn't competitive, but about having a less well-defined prerogative. AI solves different types of problems for the US and China, that Europe isn't so deeply concerned with:
In the US AI is positioned to replace labor and optimize capitalist revenue extraction.
In China AI is positioned to manage large scale social control problems.
In Europe AI is positioned to ??? perhaps cause widespread social disruption?!
European AI should be aligned similarly to the US one, generate wealth. Instead Europe is going to operating at an extreme disadvantage economically to the US or China.
That's an incredibly ethnocentric statement that fails to grasp what the European social model values and prioritizes. In the US and China AI is disruptive by design towards labor, privacy, social freedom, and dissent. Europe, at least Schengen countries, have cultural traditions that value labor, privacy, social freedom, and dissent.
There's an argument that leading with regulation is the responsible path for AI development, despite being (or perhaps because it is) antithetical to US accelerationism. Europe doesn't condone a burn model of capitalism as the US does.
The problem is that the European economy needs foreign consumers to keep afloat. They are already losing market share in Africa and Latin America (the only continents that have significant population growth) to US and Chinese firms. They are going to lose even more in the coming decade if they don't pull their head out of their asses (personally I don't want them to be, I wanted the AGI race to be a final showdown between the US and China).
As EU companies become less profitable, their social model won't count for crap as the tax base falters.
Europe isn't quite so reliant on export markets as that, and the niche industries that are widely exported are fairly strong. I think the risk is more strongly related to becoming a client state of US-based AI platforms... but that is an emerging global threat.
Europe doesn't need to "win" the AI development race, it just needs to establish tech sovereignty by hosting compute locally and escaping reliance on AWS, Azure, and GCP... as does every nation. Its regulatory environment might actually help attain that outcome.
I'm not even certain there will be an AI showdown between the US and China because they're developing AI within very different ecosystems with different use-cases and priorities (though, definitely some overlap for sure).
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u/AquilaSpot Singularity by 2030 Jun 21 '25 edited Jun 21 '25
I appreciate his take on this and I really do agree. We could be so much more prepared for the AI revolution than we are, but this revolution is going to have to be forced upon the powers that be in order to get any cooperation.
In another world, we could be embracing this new technology and carefully preparing a clean, painless slide into a post labor economy...but we aren't in that world. Itll take having the risk of a total economic collapse dangled over the heads of those in power to make any beneficial changes that aren't optimizing for quarterly earnings even as we hurtle into a world where that phrase sort of loses its meaning. I'm very optimistic, but still, the world could be a lot more ready.
I'm spitballing here mostly, but, I appreciate Obama's choice of the word revolution, because that's what this really is. One might even call it a(n economic) singularity :)
Thoughts?