Caleb Watney
@calebwatney
head of public policy @coeff_giving, previously co-founded @IFP // the US is the R&D lab for the world and we should act like it
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One underrated dynamic in the politics of AI -- expectations of future political salience can affect political positioning today.
E.g., Gov. Newsom seems to be running far and fast away from his previous veto of SB1047, in part because he expects AI to be a top-3 political issue when he's campaigning in 2027/28.
Even though AI is not a top-10 issue today, I'd expect other politicians to start "updating all the way" on political salience post-midterms and realize that positions they take on AI over the next 6-12 months will be the basis of political judgment in 2028.
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Extremely funny to me that the anti-AI safety take has now shifted to "We shouldn't worry about these crazy sci-fi risks... We should only care about near-term issues like AI-enabled bioterrorism and cyber hacking 😤"
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finally got my hands on a copy
An interesting argument in the "AI as normal technology" view is that many important skills may plateau near top-human level because the world contains irreducible uncertainty. Maybe you can't be 100x better than Nate Silver at election modeling.
We should get a good test of this hypothesis in the next year or two as AI forecasting efforts scale.
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