No Seat at the AI Table

Remember when Trump raged and screamed, "We will never again touch the AI of the radical-left lunatics at Anthropic"? Well, he didn't scream out loud, but he did hammer the caps lock on his Truth Social keyboard. That was only six months ago.

Two weeks ago, when Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk warned that the pace of development needs to be halted before we lose control of AI, Trump flew into a rage, called it a deranged conspiracy and declared that all that's needed is a strong president "with a high IQ like mine!"

And then, this week, he calmed down, sat in a room with all the big bosses, and out came a self-regulation agreement for the major AI companies. They will police themselves across several layers to make sure AI doesn't go off the rails. Legislation, enforcement, criminal liability? Let's not get carried away. Yes, really: the fox is guarding its own henhouse.

And that isn't even what worries me most. The people striking deals here are company bosses and the President of the United States, all of them with very large vested interests. None of them represents me, the ordinary non-American citizen. I have no seat and no voice at the table where the decisions are made, even though this AI affects my personal life just as much. If it makes mistakes, discriminates, gets hacked or runs amok in ways that touch my life, nothing those honourable gentlemen agreed over in America will protect me.

So we had better get used to it: the consequences of AI, and how it is regulated, have become a burning economic and political issue. And unlike other powerful technologies, this one could one day wipe out a billion people, as Bill Gates puts it. What worries me just as much is its potential to wreck democracy, liberalism and capitalism long before that.