some quick thoughts on ai and mainstream politics 1) i think we have entered the phase where ai becomes relevant to mainstream politics; this means that it will become partisan issue 2) mainstream politics works through narratives; new facts should hook into existing narratives; datacenters become fracking, ea becomes globalism, etc... 3) the norms of communication are much more tribal; a lot of things that could be discussed at a technical level before will become much more tribally coded 4) so, one of the reasons that people are discussing the appearance of metr employees is that it is an attempt to describe their cultural background / tribe 5) and so, to determine, are they on our side? do they agree with us on important political issues? if given power, will they do things contrary to our interests? 6) i don't know how much of this was avoidable; ai was always going to become world important and therefore a political issue, with the things that result from that 7) a real question is the extent to which dario picking a fight with the trump admin over war claude made the american right less willing to be safety oriented 8) the incident basically primed trump to be against whatever dario proposed; and, anthropic was always going to be an advocate of ai safety 9) now, i think that trump will come around on ai regulation over time and may even try to strike a deal on it with china; that would be very trump 10) but, we have less of a chance now for technocratic regulation before the issues become highly politically charged, they will be charged before regulation 11) also, there is going to be a lot of rediscovery by the public of things that everyone in the ai scene already knows; for instance, how ai safety orgs are funded 12) also, the unconventional lifestyles (from the point of the public) of certain prominent figures in the ai scene; and, things like lighthaven, etc... 13) a lot of this will be difficult for many insiders to understand and expect, because they are used to a conversation where the norms were more rationalist 14) but, things are in the saddle and onward we go unto the gentle singularity; us-china, robotics, biology, agentic commerce, etc... so many things are in the offing