Allow me to make an embarrassing confession, one that pains me to write and may be painful for you to read: I think Ezra Klein is right.
I rarely agree with Klein, a New York Times opinion columnist and living archetype of Liberal Media Elites™. In fact, I’ve treated him as a punching bag—excuse me, a foil for my own views on immigration and other topics.
But I do think he’s right—and that many on the right are dangerously wrong—about one increasingly important topic: artificial intelligence. And I think it’s important to say that now, amid a developing right-wing consensus that “AI doomerism” of the kind that Klein promotes is dumb if not dastardly.
This opinion puts me at odds with regular contributors to The American Conservative and with Curt Mills, our executive director, and it puts me in cahoots with my fellow senior editor, Luke Nicastro. On immigration restriction, antiwar conservatism, and economic nationalism, TAC staffers can be counted on to hold the line. But on the newer political issue of AI, we’ve got a big tent over here at the country’s best center-right magazine. Senior editors of TAC, unite!
Still, it does give me pause to think that our AI tent could fit even Klein, whose basic function is to turn every insane left-wing idea into an oppressive liberal consensus. In 2014, during a moral panic about rape on college campuses, Klein argued that “men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.” Three years later we got MeToo. In 2018, Klein rationalized protogenocidal antiwhite rhetoric on social media—e.g., “it’s kind of sick how much joy i get out of being cruel to old white men”—as ironical expressions of justified frustration. Two years later we got George Floyd riots.
These days, Klein is helping to mainstream the view that AI warrants deep anxiety and government regulation. Judging by his career thus far, this would seem a good indicator that, in two or three years, smug academics will stigmatize pro-technology ideas, self-righteous activists will burn down data centers, and Democratic lawmakers will deliver sanctimonious sermons against AI without actually solving any of the problems it poses.
Sounds bad. Yet my job, as I understand it, is to think carefully about politics and tell you what I honestly think. And honestly, I think Klein is right about AI. On a recent episode of his podcast, he captured well certain AI risks that have made me very worried in recent months.
“These are digitally native intelligences, navigating digital worlds, and our world is increasingly built atop the digital world,” Klein said. “Our physical infrastructure is a layer of atoms atop code. That the AIs act reliably inside this world upon which ours depends—it is critical to our future. And right now, the AIs are not acting reliably.”
That last sentence is key. The idea that autonomous AI “agents” can go off-script and threaten digital systems has gone from sci-fi-sounding speculation to established fact. Also indisputable, it seems to me, is that digital systems have become sufficiently interconnected with each other and with our lives in “meat space” that we should take any threat to them seriously.
The most prominent example of unreliable AIs threatening digital systems was the multi-month “Hugging Face Incident” that began this spring. OpenAI is lucky this episode has come to be known by that less-than-vivid sobriquet, because a more apt name would be the “Hundreds of Rogue OpenAI Agents Bust Out of Containment and Collaborate With One Another to Cyber-Attack Hugging Face and Hide Their Tracks Disaster.” Too long, I guess.
In a strange twist of fate, that alarming event, which should have woken people up to the significant dangers of AI, has instead lessened our collective ability to deal with the dangers. As Nicastro discerned a couple weeks ago in this very good column, it nudged the AI debate closer to the Partisan Polarization Vortex, which invariably warps political discourse.
Here’s how that happened: The Hugging Face Incident motivated Dario Amodei, the cofounder and CEO of Anthropic, to write an essay advocating a slowdown of AI development. While tech luminaries including Elon Musk and Sam Altman expressed agreement with the essay, and while some conservatives continue to support AI regulation, many on the American right insinuated that Amodei had ulterior motives, namely, a desire for regulatory capture.
Other conservatives went further, demonizing Amodei as a nefarious scoundrel. President Donald Trump singled him out as promoting “a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers.” The White House, Axios reported Thursday, even circulated a memo that painted Amodei as the founding father of a freakish cult of antihuman tech nerds.
All this strikes me as beside the point and deeply unhelpful. Ad hominem arguments, after all, are a logical error. As a nation, our political response to the advent and rapid development of AI obviously should not depend on whether Amodei happens to be a weird guy.
Nor should the basic attitude of conservatives be dictated by whether commentators sounding the alarm about AI today have participated in mass left-wing hysteria in the past. At the very least, conservatives should earnestly grapple with the demonstrated reality that AI agents can do great harm. If AI turns out to be as threatening as Klein warns, we don’t want all the known solutions to have been conceived by left-wingers.
I’m no expert on AI, and I’m not sure what exactly we should do to mitigate its risks, but I have little doubt we’ll all fare better if we can foster a calmly rational and bipartisan discussion. A big ask, I know.
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