Dominic Cummins provides a “Hollywood pitch summary” of his perspective on AI and power:
a) the destruction will be greater than the optimists think, b) attempts by the old regimes to regulate it will probably generally do more harm than good, c) I hope it accelerates regime change because the old regimes are driving us to violence/war, d) the politics of the ‘stop’ people are generally somewhere between the worst kind of student politics and extremely dangerous and I’d rather take my chances defending the old Anglo civilisation than ‘we need a form of Stalinism for safety’, e) those most concerned about it should stop treating AI policy as another ‘policy’, where they try to ‘engage in rational debate’ and hope the old regime executes ‘better policy’, and face that the AI revolution is entangled with the death of the post-1945 world and the creation of whatever’s coming, so push what is falling, ditch rationalism, ditch ‘solving alignment’ is ‘the answer’ — you will not find a technical solution to politics and power; f) the most important thing is that a subset of elites now outside politics face they will have to abandon their happy lives and go to DC and build a new regime, as did Washington, Lincoln, and FDR…