25 Years of the “War on Terror” w/ Silky Shah & Darakshan Raja

Are you excited for your $5,000 bribe to vote Republican? In case you missed last week's desperate and bizarre attempt by the GOP to hold a midterm pep rally, President Trump promised in a lengthy and rambling speech to deliver $5,000 payouts to every American adult on the condition that Republicans, quote, win the midterms.

But it's definitely not a bribe.

It's a dividend for all the winning we've been doing.

But again, you only get it if the Republicans get to keep power.

This plan is, unsurprisingly, remarkably light on details.

Like, does this mean a simple GOP majority in both the House and the Senate? Does Congress have to approve this payout, as is their constitutional authority? Where does this money even come from? At the same time, there are some baffling stipulations, like every dollar has to be spent in the US or maybe just on US-owned companies.

Is this some kind of traceable company's script that can only be spent on proven end-to-end American goods and services? No one can answer these questions because it is, of course, all bullshit.

Despite Trump repeatedly doubling down on the promise throughout the week, it's become pretty obvious that the professional liar in chief will not or cannot live up to this promise.

I don't doubt that there are some true believers who are stoked on it, but it smacks to me of the sweaty desperation of a man who's worried that after all the strategizing and efforts to cheat and steal these midterm elections, there might be something to those abysmal approval numbers after all.

I frankly hope that we don't get to find out.

The internet was ablaze last week, too, with discourse about the announcement from Jacob Coxon, a former anthropic engineer who expressed grave concern about the supposed existential threat to human life posed by AI.

This is, of course, not the first time this has happened, including as long as two and a half years ago when William Saunders, another tech researcher, left OpenAI.

These guys are close to the source, and I point this out not to give them credibility, but to bring attention to the fact that they're part of the in-crowd of true believers.

Their ideas are coming straight from the top.

Industry leaders like Elon Musk, Dario Amadei, and Sam Altman love to talk how absolutely scary and threatening general artificial intelligence might become, because they also want you to believe that they're the ones that need to build it.

So China does it.

Or whatever.

I'm cribbing from Timnit Debru, former Google researcher and founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute, when I point out that a lot of this is a large-scale narrative game.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are gearing up for their initial public offerings on the stock market.

Meanwhile, they're coming up under greater and greater public pressure around hyperscale data center build-outs and other more quotidian types of harm that actually exist in the real world right now.

And they're increasingly seeing that politicians across the political spectrum are finding their courage to attempt to, at the very least, slow things down because their constituents are pissed.

In other words, by saying that their technologies are an existential threat to human life, they're trying to eclipse the real life concerns of the present with something so big, so epic, and so science fictional in a hypothetical future that we lose sight of what the real problem is, that these people are warehousing massive amounts of stolen data to automate jobs, corrupt our media system, and immiserate everyday people.

They are also actively causing untold collateral damage in the process by replicating racism, sexism, transphobia, and all manner of other prejudice in ways that can then be blamed on a computer program instead of the bias of the person using or creating the program.

It's funny how these supposed whistleblowers just keep getting platformed on cable news talk shows to talk about existential risk.

Meanwhile, Coxon had nothing to say about the new report from the American Prospect, also out last week, about how despite its PR barrage earlier this year, Anthropic is quietly restarting contracts with the military and appears to be on a hiring spree focused on gathering intelligence about, and I quote, threats to the AI industry, including from government regulation, geopolitical instability, and of course, grassroots activism.