I’ve been getting lots of your emails about Artificial Intelligence and its place right at the center of so many inflection points — alliances in the new world of oligarchs, the global authoritarian movement, the Gulf princes and their money and more. One of those emails was from TPM Reader AO. AO’s central point was that this is principally a technology, productivity and economics question, and really not a political one. People may hate it but mostly because they don’t know what it is. And in any case it doesn’t matter. Because this is a transformative technology being driven by private capital investment and it’s a change that’s coming regardless of what anyone thinks. With that roll out you may think we were off to a bad start. But it was an interesting conversation and it continues. I reiterated various points I’ve made in posts here, etc. But there was one point that I realized I hadn’t made explicitly enough in those posts.
As I’ve said before, I think it’s really important to distinguish between the actual technology — LLM-based AI — and the political formations forming around it. They’re not the same thing. They’re both really important on their own terms. It’s important to give both sufficient room in a discussion of either topic.
So here goes.
