Where they differ, of course, is when it comes to what those values are. His view of AI as an existential threat, as speculative as it might be, leads him to the same conclusion of his fiercest critics on the left: That government should intervene to guide technological progress in a manner conducive to human values. With a slew of his similarly-concerned fellow tech and business potentates, he signed an open letter last month calling for a six-month pause on advanced AI projects, and opened his interview with Carlson by calling for an entirely new regulatory agency to tackle AI risk. What we do know for certain is that nothing like it currently exists, nor does any evidence that points to its possibility.
Many think that it’s possible and will kill us all.
Many think that it’s possible, and desirable. Many researchers think this is impossible. Within the AI community, there is a fervent and ongoing debate about the hypothetical existence of an “artificial general intelligence,” or an AI agent so sophisticated that it surpasses human cognition. During the interview Musk described to Tucker the evolution of his now-defunct friendship with Larry Page, the Google co-founder, AI innovator and ardent transhumanist, saying that having “talked to him late to the night about AI safety” he’s concluded that Page was “not taking AI safety seriously enough,” and that he “seemed to … want some kind of digital superintelligence, basically a digital God.”Ī brief pause to explain. He has, rather, a very specific existential fear. Musk is not anti-AI - he just announced the founding of his own new company, X.AI, to produce competing products to OpenAI and Microsoft, which he views as too “woke” and developmentally reckless. Where Roosevelt’s private-sector bugbears were the industrial-age charnel houses of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Musk’s are much more ethereal: Namely, the alleged risk to civilization posed by the development of artificial intelligence. Musk - who described to a stonily silent Carlson how he voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 and expressed his desire for “a normal person with common sense” as president, “whose values are smack in the middle of the country” - fits, if imperfectly, into that same lineage, combining a socially conservative politics, an eagerness to regulate industries he believes are dangerous and an unwavering belief in expansion at all costs. Here in America, its historical tribune is still Teddy Roosevelt, whose populist views on trade and domestic policy paired with an almost religious belief in American expansion and dominance. The mantle of “progressive conservatism” is usually associated with the European right, which developed a technocratic pro-safety-net politics in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Even more than just a newsy exercise in political economy, however, the conversation with Musk is a reminder of how “progress,” an ideal usually associated with the American left, is in reality a value-neutral concept that can be advanced by anyone - although it obviously helps if you’re the richest man in the world.
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