This newsletter is excerpted from Derek's column published this afternoon in POLITICO Magazine. It is not difficult to figure out what Elon Musk thinks. On Twitter, of course, he pops off about everything from the threat of population collapse to Taylor Swift’s business acumen, while fueling the “anti-woke” social reaction that made his purchase of the social media platform less a business decision than a new front in a holy war. But just in case you wanted more, Musk announced last week that he would be conducting “interviews across the political spectrum” with everyone from Tucker Carlson to … uh, the BBC. (Better luck next time, Jacobin and The Nation.) Putting aside his tendentious classification of the BBC as emblematic of “the left” for a moment, none of these interviews are likely to provide the same level of distilled insight into Musk’s worldview as the softball two-parter with Carlson that aired this Monday and Tuesday. The conversation centered on Musk’s alarmist proclamations that AI could destroy humanity, while also conveniently directing a heap of opprobrium toward the villains at the exact center of the Venn diagram between the two men’s worldviews: the “woke” censors at companies like OpenAI who, in Carlson’s words, seek “to end your independent judgment and erase democracy.” What better spokesperson for Carlson’s pet cause than one of the few men capable of competing financially with those companies? 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. 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. 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. Musk — who described to a stonily silent Carlson how he voted for 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. 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 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. He has, rather, a very specific existential fear. 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.” A brief pause to explain. 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. Many researchers think this is impossible. Many think that it’s possible, and desirable. Many think that it’s possible and will kill us all. What we do know for certain is that nothing like it currently exists, nor does any evidence that points to its possibility. Musk is worried about it anyway. 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. 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. Where they differ, of course, is when it comes to what those values are. Read the rest of the piece at POLITICO Magazine here.
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