2: Is AI About to Break Politics?

- Yeah.

- The podcast wraparound.

- The wraparound. - Nate, the podcast wraparound. - The reach around the ground. - Reach around the ground. - Reach around the ground.

- Babe. - No. - No. - We're not the latter.

“We don't need H on our case on our second official episode.”

- Okay, okay. Okay, here we go. (upbeat music) - Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Neil and Rick.

- I'm Claire Malone. - And I'm Nate Silver. - On today's show, new polling suggests Democrats are in a stronger position than ever for the midterms.

So have the midterms broken their way and what would that even entail? Then concerns about AI safety, have broken containment and entered the political debate. We're gonna discuss what Silicon Valley and now Washington

are fighting about, what Americans think, and how it's changing politics. But first, the midterms. So since our last episode, there has been quite a bunch of new polling,

included one from the New York Times. He's got a college in fact. Nate, you talked with Dan Fiverr of Potsay of America. Yesterday about that polling and folks can go check out that special on YouTube.

But we're gonna talk about it more here and about what the model shows us more broadly. So, and usually we suggest that we don't write an article or do a segment based on one poll, which we're not going to.

We're gonna talk about the whole sort of universe of new polling. But this is one, the New York Times is sort of-- - It's a real good. At this point, you like drive the political conversation,

it's a very high-quality poll. - Look, ordinarily, if our wonderful producers had asked us to do a segment on one poll, I would have said, no, sorry, I'm going for a walk or something instead, or we're gonna write about how,

you know, with AI is gonna kill us all. The reason I chose to do this, and you can go to the YouTube feed for more on this, is because it's actually not an outlier, right? It's consistent with almost all the polling we've seen.

- Well, let's say what it says, which is Democrats leading in the generic ballot, which is when pollsters ask,

“do you support a Democrat or a Republican for cotton?”

- Okay, fair enough, in generic ballot is-- - Okay, Democrats leave in the generic ballot by about eight and a half points according to the latest poll. - On a likely voter basis. Yeah, we talked about last week after Labor Day,

pollsters traditionally switch over from using registered voters to likely voters, and our model, Flipper, (laughs)

and that's never going to happen, that's always going to be creepy.

- I thought it was a week or the week one dolphin noise was better. That dolphin feels like-- - And that was a throw away. - No, it was a wrong answer. - I wasn't a part of the ballot, but, you know,

our model had detected that likely voter polls were likely to be better for Democrats. So it was kind of priced into some extent, but still to see Democrats up by eight and a half points that can be eight or nine depending on how you round it,

is consistent with what we thought, but any notion of like, oh, people will come back, kids come back to school, and then we'll see Republicans rebound because, you know, their voter gets fired up by Democrats being too left-wing or be the oil to President Trump.

I mean, there's not many signs of that. Instead, you see in the New York Times poll, a pretty big gap between lecternous to vote, between Harris, 2024 voters, and Trump 2024 voters, and you also see independence, really leaning

toward Democrats in their congressional races. Right, it's something like a little over 60% of Harris, 2024 voters saying they're almost certain to vote. - Which is why JD Vance is telling all the Republican voters to go out and vote, right?

- Yeah, it was something like 56,58% of Trump 2024 voters. I'm suggesting here that we got a lot of data here beyond just that generic ballot top line. Clear, what's stuck out to you in the latest poll? - Honestly, the immigration and economy numbers.

Democrats on immigration, people trust them 52%, Democrat 45% and on the economy, they trust Democrats 51% to Republicans 45%. The immigration number in particular,

when I was first scanning through, I was like,

oh, that's really interesting because that's obviously where Trump was kind of doing his bread and butter work. Since 2016, but particularly in the last year, obviously there's been a lot of immigration actions by the administration and the economy,

it's like all we can talk about ever is the affordability crisis. I mean, I was texting a group of friends yesterday about the bond market and casual. - And interest rates for home loans

“because that's what you worry about when you're almost 40.”

And so I think a lot of people, you know, just those are really terrible numbers for a Republican that basically made his campaign and his party sort of coalesce around those two issues. - Yeah, it's driven as you might expect

by college-ish-coded voters, voters with advanced degree or degree are 59, 37, and favor of Democratic policy and immigration. Non-college voters who are the majority of electorate lean toward Republicans by only four points there,

So yeah, you see, I think the aftermath of Minneapolis

also, ironically, you can argue that

“in certain ways Trump is being penalized for his own success.”

I mean, we have had a lot less immigration on this other boarder, right? So like it might be a less visible problem. And so now Trump looks more extreme with some of the ICE actions and things like that.

But yeah, this was supposed to be his strength. It's not as bad as some of his other numbers, but it's no longer a strength, it's a lesser weakness, I guess you'd say. - Yeah, I mean, folks will have heard me say

on a previous podcast that voters still prefer Republicans over Democrats on immigration. Now, this is likely voters, which sort of over represents college-educated voters, high-prepensity voters, people who are very locked in,

the electorate will look different, come 20, 28. But this is a change, right? This is Trump's biggest strength becoming a vulnerability that is on par with the economy and foreign wars according to this, right?

Underwater Republicans are by seven points on the economy, immigration, foreign wars. - Well, I don't think, well, sorry. - I don't think immigration's gonna motivate nearly as many votes to come.

But in terms of preferences between the two parties, I mean, it's obvious that affordability is the number one issue in this election. - Are we, are we doing the affordability thing? And I taught inflation, man.

Affordability feels too ephemistic to me. I have an objection to that term. - Okay, what? - Okay, yeah, no, I want to get it.

That's what we've always called it.

I mean, affordability might be kind of like technically or accurate, but it feels like a little bit of-- - What about-- - What about it? - I mean, it just feels like a Neil, how do you say Neil, Gilliz and whatever, right?

But like, I feel like it's a word that is a little bit contains a little spin. I mean, there are a lot of political terms, you know, that I have-- - But does it have to also do as wages, not keeping up,

but inflation, or cost of living? Isn't it more encompassing than simply just inflation itself? Isn't it wage- - I just feel like it's been a lot of time-- - I think that's what I think-- - Biden era denying that inflation was so high

or that voters had realistic reasons to be concerned about it and then it kind of transformed. I'm just interested in political language. Probably you think I'm making it annoying, pedantic? - No, it's-- - Objection, that's why--

- That's why I'm Nate. - Well, like-- - But like, it's a new term. - I don't know what people are pissed off about is just the fact that we're experiencing sort of 3.4%

annualized inflation. I think people feel are feeling while the accumulation of inflation over a 6-year span, but also the sense that-- and there are certain parts of the economy

that have to do also with interest rates. You're just talking about home costs, which are not directly inflation, but cost of living--

“if you want to call it cost of living great,”

I will let me make a point though on exactly that, which is that in your silver bulletin model, when you look at Trump's approval rating on the cost of living inflation, whatever the fuck you want to call it,

he's 40% at points under water. Like, it's really fucking bad. When you look at this though, when you look at the economy or cost of living in this, Democrats only lead Republicans by 7 or 8 points, right?

Republicans are still getting 43 to 45% of the electorate on this issue. That means that there are a lot of people who are not happy with what Trump is doing, but are not going to vote for a Democrat.

They're still going to vote for a Republican when push comes to shove, and there are a lot of people who still remember the Biden here. The communist thing still works,

and I do, I mean, to go back to your thing about the Biden years and inflation, that is true, right? Like, there was a little bit of-- - Yeah, it's like, oh, it's misinformation,

like, don't put your eye on it. - Don't put your eye on it. - Yeah, let me guess. - It's a five dollar $5 gallon gas. It's not misinformation, that's like,

“you know, that's actually what you have to pay”

if you actually try to get your tank filled. But look, there's this famous, I think, Bill Clinton debate answer in 1992, where a woman asked a question about the national debt, and President Bush answers it very literally,

and then Clinton realizes this woman just has concerns about the economy in general, and answers it less literally and talks about inflation and things like that. And so, you know, I'm just sensitive to political speech,

because people were not calling it affordability and the previous presidency. I feel like it's a piece of framing that's actually affected. Like, if I were John Ossoff or Cory Booker, or something, I'd use that term.

But I'm just sensitive to the speech thing you write. - I do, I also think it is more setting aside the Biden or the politicize use of it. I do think it's more descriptive of how people feel. Like, the reason why I was texting about the bond market

is because shout out to Ben Castleman, former by 30 at Stafford, who is now the chief economics courseman at the times, he was on the daily yesterday. And he said this one thing that really freaks me out,

which was basically like,

actually maybe the last 20 years of low interest rates were the aberration itself,

And I think that coupled with the fact that like the first home that people buy in America, the price of it has gone up astronomically in New York. I mean, let's not even talk about it. It feels sort of a filthy thing to say.

And those things coupled with like 30, what, grocery prices are 30% higher than they were in 2020. It just feels more encompassing and atmospheric than to say like interest rates or inflation rates. Right, I agree.

Maybe my point is to pedantic, but like, people don't cleanly differentiate

“the different economic anxieties that they have, right?”

And it's always been based on a mix of kind of vibes

and objective data. I mean, that was kind of one of my big critiques about like about the Biden years, people would say, well, the economy is actually doing fairly well. My job's really to measures and it's just bad vibes.

Like, well, the vibes are always bad because press coverage is usually negative. And like, a lot of people in a lot of Westernized countries feel as though they're getting their wrong end of the deal. And, you know, we now have one or two percent growth

per year instead of two or three or four percent and that compounds over periods of time. Let me say, retroactively, we should have called it an affordability issue under Biden as opposed to just not in the terms.

As I'm not calling it an affordability issue under Trump. And I say that because when you look at the data, Americans were becoming literally poor

for the first, basically, three years of Biden's presidency,

which is to say prices were growing faster than wages and by the summer of 2022, by a real significant clip. And so Americans, as much as you could say, oh, but like, look at employment levels. Americans were getting poor and you couldn't tell them

don't believe you're lying pocketbook or whatever. Let's zoom back out to the midterms overall when we sat down here last week for our first episode, the your Senate model over at Silver Bulletin was roughly 50/50.

And I made a joke about you amping up the drama as we returned from our summer vacations. Now Democrats are back up to about 60% in your Senate model.

“I think that's the highest they have been since you launched.”

I imagine the New York Times is going to college polls. A piece of this, but not the whole. Yeah, one thing to do, I mean, the model is designed so that anyone individual polls should not affect it all that much, right?

It's the overall constellation of polling. Quinnipiac had a poll showing Democrats up 11 points on the generic ballot. You go up has them up like a 10 or 11 and among likely voters, they're doing much better

than among registered voters. Market University, which is a strong poster, had them up some gargantuan number, like 12 or 13 points. It's not even in our model yet that came out this morning. So it's been pretty consistent.

It's also been like it's really hard now to find any Texas polls where James Talarico is not ahead. He's ahead within the margin of error in any individual poll, but collectively that presents a fair amount of evidence.

So sure, Brown's been ahead in basically every poll of Ohio.

There are some exceptions.

“I mean, New Hampshire polling has been maybe surprisingly close.”

We talked a little bit about New Hampshire last week. But our flipper is actually pretty steady and stubborn for our presidential model. It moves faster because you have more of a focal point on just this one race that has 50 different manifestations

in 50 states. Despite that, we are gathering a fairly consistent story about democratic performance in these polls has been quite strong post-labor day. And does this what we're looking at right now

take into account the fact that Cook just moved just rating for New Hampshire? Oh my God. I just didn't care if I took race moves. It does, except we have to de bias the expert ratings

because they are completely miscalabrated to any reasonable person, probably including them thinks what the national environment's gonna be. Yeah, we got a listener question on this, which I was debating whether or not we should dive into.

Let's do it really quickly and then we'll move on to whether AI is going to kill us. So Korko Queen on X asked about the gap between the quantitative forecast models like yours and the model at split ticket, which is the argument,

our friend Laksha Jane runs that vote hub, which is exactly to Nini, where Democrats are projected to win in your model, like 30 plus seats. The model outcome is like 30 plus seats in the house or 27 seats over at split ticket, et cetera.

Then when you look at the expert ratings, like Saturday's Crystal Ball, Cook Political Report inside elections, the model outcome is, you know, Saturday's Crystal Ball, it's Democrats winning four house seats,

inside elections, it's Republicans winning five. This may have changed since this listener asked this question. How do you make sense of the vast? - That's great to hear. - Extremely, I'm trying to figure out how unpc I can be.

- Just go with like, medium, unpc, yeah. - No, no, no, they have no fucking balls.

on the line and say the Democrats are gonna have a good year. And then what will happen is, is, you know, on like October 25th, they'll say, oh, now the blue wave has arrived. The blue wave's already fucking here in the polls.

The polls might be wrong. The polls probably are not gonna change that much between now and November, so, you know, grow a pair of balls. You can, I don't get that, I don't care. Like it's got this to call something like

a new Hampshire toss-up. Would you really-- - Were you shit talker in baseball? - Like in sports? - I wasn't like, good at sports, clever. (laughing)

- If you've had to bring her a lifetime, can I ask, is there anywhere on the map

“where you're like, I believe the race raiders over whipper?”

- Well, it might be something like, like, in Texas, the fact that they rate it as toss-up or maybe even tilt our or something, right? Like, that's useful as a relative signal, right? So like, if you can sort out, you know,

I might disagree with them on like New Hampshire or something, but like, it's directionally helpful to have like an expert signal, but it's like, why on earth are you telling us this is gonna be like a D+1 environment?

It's not even a good baseline assumption. In a presidential year, yeah, the house tends to be fairly neutral, but like in mid-term years, particularly in second terms,

it almost always favors the out party anyway.

And like, it's just, it's just kind of hedging in this very strange way that, as a forecaster, you've been more criticized anyone else being frankly often more right than anyone else, not always.

But like, being criticized with like legibility and the public of how we present probability is like, they're making my job kind of harder, and it's pretty fucking annoying. - Okay, well, we'll see, maybe they'll respond

while bringing it up next time we gather here. But actually, we'll bring them on the show next time. - All right, gauntlet is down. - Gauntlet is down. - Still counting is brought to you by zipper cruder.

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- All right, I'm sure we're gonna talk about them in terms more as we discuss AI. But let's dive into the AI apocalypse. So over a month ago, 1,300 staffers at Frontier AI companies wrote an open letter calling for AI regulation.

There was barely a ripple in the news. A week ago, a researcher at Enthrop Egg named Jacob Coxen posted about his resignation on X warning that, quote, "The people building AI "urinously believe that it could kill us all

"by the end of the decade." Those treats set off a firmware that is still in progress as we record replinks through Silicon Valley and Washington, like Claire. Why did Jacob Coxen's post break through in a way

“that, I mean, months but also like years of warnings have not?”

- It is kind of a mystery to me.

I can't remember actually who the first politician was

who amplified it. I think it helped that the other AI leaders amplified it. But it was a little bit odd to me because honestly, I've been as the person who on this podcast who doesn't really use AI.

I have been morally disturbed by AI for a long time. - This is a Catholic thing. - I mean, yeah, like I think it is. I mean, I mean, I do think I'd have a very, that there is something to me that is really disturbing

about, you know, when we're all talking, when AI people will talk about the new world that we can live in with the benefits of AI, you know, like many people, and the idea of curing cancers or things like medical breakthroughs, great, that sounds good.

But when they talk about things like, we can all just not work and pursue our hobbies. I mean, that stuff actually, you can look at a state like West Virginia,

but hollowed out by industries that don't exist.

Like coal and people, you know, there is something to the dignity of work and people feeling a purpose in their life. I mean, I do have pulled up in front of me on my computer screen, the Papal Encyclical by Leo, the 14th. - All right, we don't need to do that.

- But I'm not just asking. - No, but I'm saying, I'm saying, this is, listen, just, this is a long preamble. But I actually think it's important because the reason why people are so

existentially disturbed by this is it is, like the Industrial Revolution, like the Luddites before them, like it is this real feeling of threat to a human's way of life, and the fact that it no longer feels like total weirdos talking that way, feels like people are sort of saying, like, okay, we--

- Well, that's part of what you're seeing now is that like I've known these weirdos for a long time. I'm weirdo adjacent when they say, right? There's a lot of coverage of AI in my book where I talk to, simultaneously, and a lot of the leading figures in all the labs,

talk to all the effective altruists, all the rationalists, I'm happy to do a little glossary if people want or not.

It's always a mystery as people who cover the new cycle,

but in some ways are critics of the new cycle too.

“It's always a mystery why Evan and he give in the story blows up, right?”

Why some mass shootings, for example, dominate the front pages for days, and others are just ignored. Sometimes I have to deal with the privilege of where these are taking place, right? Why some police killings become major stories, and some don't. Proximity to New York and DC and things like that probably helps too.

But yeah, people are experiencing a lot of understandable anxiety about AI and objectively speaking when you have leaders of these companies saying, "Oh, by the way, I agree with him," right? I agree with him that this could cause an existential risk. I think it's over to a lot of sudden shifts in news coverage,

have to stories that were overlooked before, and I'm happy that this is penetrating from just the weird nerds. My support, I'm a weird nerd myself into mainstream discourse,

and it feels like time is about what I would expect

to do in a coxon is not a particularly remarkable. I mean, what are you saying is what a lot of people have been saying for years? Yeah, I think it's sort of, it is like the weirdos in Silicon Valley who have been doing this thing. Like if you're an AI researcher, you have existed for the past 15 years

in a subculture, right? You've got a PhD, you've got a PhD at one of these places. You went to become a mathematician, maybe at one of these Silicon Valley companies, you lived in a group house. You were segmented within others like you, talking to each other for years and years.

There was a group think that sort of became, you know, that turned into the different sort of contagions of doomerism or the effect of altruists, all those things, but you were all talking to each other. And frankly, like the fact that it has broken contagion,

like all respect to weirdos and, you know, smart weirdos and people building technology, but I don't want to live in their world.

“Like I don't, that's what I do not understand what I do.”

Not I and a lot of other people do not ascribe to that being like a good future. And I think the fact that so many people are sort of realizing, like, oh, this is the president's not going to stop it. The government doesn't know how to regulate it. These guys sort of are also telling us that it's bad,

but they don't have a plan to stop it. It is kind of like, oh, maybe we should freak out. I want to, like, given that we try to direct our lens towards the broad public and analyzing these things, and I want to maybe add some numbers to this. I did a whole, it was like, if you want to listen to every poll out there

about AI, we talked about it on GDP politics this week. But like to summarize a bit, what you see is a lot of skepticism. And I think this is quickly shifting train. And so we're going to have to see how the past week and a half gets priced in to American concerns going forward.

Like even in this near-time Santa College poll, you don't see AI as a particularly big concern. And you also don't see a code, like, oh, there's, it was the one in American Republicans actually had more trust. It was when I thought how it would make of that.

But I mean, this poll happened before. Not exclusively, it ended over the weekend. Okay. But it was the biggest issue on which people didn't have an opinion. 20% of Americans couldn't choose a party,

whereas like 97% of Americans can choose a party on immigration. But let me say, up until this point, at least, when you, and actually you got a jitter poll that after Cox and was in the press a lot and Dara Amade, et cetera, started reacting, you saw still in the sort of fast quick response. You go poll by far the bigger concern is still jobs over will AI kill.

“I mean, they literally ask, are you concerned that AI is going to kill us all?”

Americans are concerned about that by a 12 point margin. Are you concerned that AI is going to take all of our jobs? Americans are concerned about that by more than a 50 point margin. And so to your point about maybe a, you know, a Catholic work ethic or keeping a human in the loop or the role of humans in determining

And then when you ask them what do you want the government to do? And you can propose almost anything. And it'll only be like 15% of Americans who are like, no, I don't want to do that. Whether it's like AI safety for children, whether it's stopping AI from becoming super intelligent, whether it's protecting artists, et cetera.

Like, there is, there's been this growing concern. There's been this growing local issue of data centers too,

which is also, sorry, about affordability, ultimately, water and electricity prices.

And it's sort of burst open in this way that's about safety. But still, the biggest concerns are about humans roll in, in, in, in working. Well, it is also, I will also say, just, it is actually a big thing in education and, and how it's affecting children.

“Like, I think, you know, we live in New York City, like, I'm sort of in that discourse, right?”

Like, New York City, um, just banned, I think, the use of AI products. I think a lot in, in the schools, I think a lot of other school systems are sort of starting to think about that. That sort of goes with the pairing of, like, phones. People are in addition to the work aspect. And I wouldn't frame it as Catholic work ethic.

I would say, like, the dignity of the human and how work and purpose is connected to that. Well, I was just trying to, I was just trying to... I totally, but... I was giving her an opportunity to read the encyclical. It's really what I was doing. I mean, I'm like, I'm like, put that out as a bonus step or so.

Yeah, um, my dad and I can do it together, um, but I think it's, it's the idea of, um, not just work, right? I mean, this is about work, but it's about people envisioning a future and thinking about their kids.

And thinking, wait a second, is the, is the education that I'm giving my kid going to even be useful?

Like, it's people really starting to turn on to not just the, the Andrew Yang thing of, like, hey, when he said what, four years ago, um, the robots are going to come take your jobs.

“I think we all kind of get that that the robots are going to take a lot of jobs.”

And now it's an, it's an existential level further where it's like, people are thinking about kids and education to and how their work lives will be. And I think that that's deeply unsettling for a lot of parents and families. And that, yeah, I think it's a double layer. I think unsettling is a good term because I don't think this is necessarily the direction is clear.

The direction is anxiety fear of AI, right? And a you go of poll, I'm looking at the chart of this. I'm going to interpolate the numbers.

But it looks like 66% of people say roughly that AI is advancing too quickly.

Only 3% say it's advancing too slowly. You know, I think with hey David Sachs, I see you in that poll. David Sachs, yeah, you know, so I think data centers have some nimbeeism and some environmentalism and things like that in concerns about water use, which might be slightly misplaced. But like, but this technology is improving very quickly.

If you, if you don't use it regularly, you might not understand the hype about it. If you do use it regularly, then you might have a right opinions.

“To me, it seems kind of almost, almost magical, right?”

To use CHPT and Claude to some extent, Gemini, all the time now for helping to code my models. Right, a year ago at this time, they were not very good at that. And now 98% of my code is written with these models. And they can take like a 30,000 line, you know, flippers, like 25,000 lines of code. And I can say diagnosed this code and it can do it.

And if you minutes and if something happens and I have to patch the code, I mean, it's, it's, I mean, so part of it, I just want to say though, like part of the reason for the timing, too, is that like, A, the models are getting better. B, there have been these security incidents like hugging face where they're capable of very persistent and very one might say creative and potentially dangerous behavior.

And that's freaking people out a little bit too. So, so, you know, it seems like the calibrated, right? Like that doesn't seem, it seems like the people who are very knowledgeable. Right. Are also very freaked out by the behavior of the model misbehavior that we actually know about.

So, I mean, the other now to the people make is this is like a slower moving early COVID phase, right? Where, you know, I remember as someone who follows the news. I'm like, well, obviously, look what happened in China. And Italy, New York City's has hit from all over the world. We're going to get, it's going to hit us fairly hard, right?

But there's still kind of like a denial. I remember like, every day it seemed like the streets got like 5% or 10% lesser. You know, I remember I would go to a couple of restaurants. Well, this is really hard to walk into, but like, people are staying home and then, and then, but you kind of saw the world emptying out. And you kind of saw it coming and, you know, that happened over a few weeks.

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Or you can use code count at checkout. That's 50% off your first order at Sundays for dogs dot com slash count. Sundays for dogs dot com slash count or use count at checkout. I want to put a finer point on the polling conversation that we're having and how Americans feel about AI. And so I have a very quick quiz for you all pop quiz.

Okay. We're going to play a game of is this more or less popular than AI per an NBC poll of earlier this year. Okay. First, more or less popular than AI. Ice.

Immigration's in customer enforcement. More popular. More popular. Nate. Gailin, can you how was the YouTube.

No, no, no, no, no, no. You just got to give me an answer. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. We need to have spelling the rules in the future.

Okay. Okay.

We need to have spelling the rules in the future.

Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay.

We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future.

Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay.

We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future.

Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay.

We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future.

Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay.

We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay. Okay. We need to have spelling the rules in the future. Okay.

what is more popular AI or the Republican Party? >> Hey, I. >> Hey. >> And Republican Party is more popular than AI. Democratic Party less popular than AI or Republican Party more popular than AI versus Democratic socialism do you have that one?

>> I don't have that on hand. Okay, thank you for participating. Your prizes are in the mail. Let's translate this all into political coalitions.

“There are coalitions in the tech world, which if you want to get into you can.”

But there are also coalitions forming in the political world. Ted Cruz, Amy Klobuchar, John Thune, are working together on an AI safety bill in the Senate. We'll find out more about the details I believe soon. Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon appeared together at a pro-human conference this week, where people heard from everyone ranging to concerned parents to artists and intellectual property

concerns to a group of Mormon, Catholic and evangelical spiritual leaders talking about the importance of humanity in the future of the world, which still feels crazy to say, how is this either transforming politics or getting funneled through the political divisions that already exist? >> I think the long story short is that you're going to probably see a super majority wanting greater AI regulation and some type of slowdown. People have concerns about their jobs.

They have just fear of technological growth in general. They have fear about more and more power being in the hands of fewer and fewer people because these are not technologies. It's not an Atari being made in someone's garage.

These are already powerful incumbent companies that are becoming more powerful potentially.

So where are the exceptions to that? You might have some people on the right who want faster growth and are concerned if the AI bubble deflated will hurt the economy. You have some people who are tech accelerationists. It's the term they use for themselves or EACs. Those people who think this technology is going to care cancer.

They might think actually it's good if the machines succeed us. They're very, very, you know, and they, yeah. They might be the two or three percent. Some of them are even transhumanists who say it's okay if we kind of fuse with computers or computers of the superior species and they replace them. We are the right people.

That's what I'm really trying to do.

Then there is a weird group of AI denialists. These people are people that established a position back five or some years ago that like, Oh, AI is just hype. The bubble is going to burst. It's not really intelligence in any form.

Some of them still put AI in square quotes. And they were rapidly wrong about this. What AI can do, even if AI doesn't get any better, which they probably will. You know, the things that it does on a routine basis now are things that they would have described as impossible five years ago. So to cover their ass, these denialists are going against by the way, the expert consensus, all these famous, you know, Nobel Prize winning scientists who say AI is dangerous and AI is very capable and just denying their own common sense.

But like, but they're in this kind of anti-regulation coalition because if they admit there's need for regulation, they have to admit they were full of shit. Who are those people?

“You can go to my Twitter feed if you want to see names.”

I do criticize people by name. I mean, there are people that I have very little respect for, but like, in the context of this show, I can't show you the evidence where they're constantly full of shit. On Twitter, you can see some examples of people who are completely out to lunch. All right. Because one thing that you said earlier, Galen, when you were reading out some of the polling, is that most Americans haven't coalesced around a partisan opinion about AI, right?

It's like a plasma stage of where sentiment goes and they're all these like, yeah, ban and in Bernie, who are actually not a strange fellow that fellows as you would think, right? They're populists. So it's, it's, I mean, very different kinds of populists, but very different kinds of rhetoric, but populists, right? Humanists, you might say, you know, maybe we should all go back to referring to ourselves as humanists. But I'm, I'm really interested in how, how normies people like me who don't use AI that much.

Normie politicians, like, I'm not talking about like an Alex Boris, right? Like a person with an AI background who's, you know, starting this like AI. Pack, I guess, just sort of try to raise awareness. But I'm talking about, yeah, like Amy Klobuchar, like, who eats her salad on a comb and, you know, maybe who's a Japanese GPT, I don't know.

“But it's obviously weird enough, but like, how does those forces who are sort of getting more interested?”

How do they interact with, as we must say, like, the high weirdos? And, and like, I think actually, what's it, I keep on forgetting the same. Our new, our, our, our, our doomer, our baby doomer. J, what's the name? Jacob Coxen, who, who was, you know, angered, I think people on the left the other day when he went on and said something on Fox where he was like,

um, what was he saying? You, you would know this. He, he had, he had, like, I think he'd been saying that doomsayer fears about environmentalism. Climate change and environmentalism have been exaggerated. Which I was like, this is so, this is like a perfect example of, um, total. Burrowed into his own, you know, probably social sphere, uh, weirdo coming out into. So it's not, uh, but like, I mean, but he's, he's someone who's, um, on television, probably pissing off people on the left.

He thought they had found sort of like this, uh, which I think he's more angel smart. Right. Right.

“I think it was very deliberate for him to go to right leaning news outlets because they're the ones, you know,”

But my, my question is how to deny this, they're a small, small part of the population. The mainstream, you know, your dad or whatever, like, that's the more important coalition to persuade. And Trump is the more important actor to persuade.

So yeah, so to go back to my question, which is, I mean, Trump has come out and basically been like,

This is all who we, uh, onward, let's beat China. How do you, and, and I think, you know, um, he, uh, he was put on speakerphone the other day at some conference by

How do they deal with? Washington.

And I mean, like, the Trump administration, but also sort of like the well-meaning probably, like,

“bipartisan people are like, how do we regulate this?”

No, and this is where the eccentricity of both the effective altruists and the kind of Silicon Valley founders themselves, makes it difficult. I'd say their political instincts are not all that good, but also they, I mean, they have a really difficult position. I mean, look, I'm impressed by the EA slash rationalist. I won't parse that distinction because they were, in some cases, predicting something like this.

In some cases, when he's 25 years ago, which when if I years ago, would seem frankly insane. So they really, they kind of really under such a technology years and events of when the general public are even kind of other elites did. But I think Jacob Cox said this. The very things that make them like good at like predicting these eccentric things kind of make them very un persuasive. Political actors.

I mean, you know, I'm not afraid to say that like, you know, you probably see a lot of high-functioning people with aspergers in that community. It's probably locating that somewhere in the right vicinity if you haven't met one of these people yet. So very smart, eccentric, interesting interests.

“What, you know, also some of them are, do you have this like trans humanist?”

Some of them think, hey, actually it would be great if no one were ever working again. And maybe the machines have agency and well, it's going to be weird, but we can all whatever. Go out of the, go to your woods and do mushrooms together. I don't know what they're envisioning exactly. So much of this conversation has been about what happens when, you know, a group, I mean,

I think you first described them as, you know, people who've been working on this for 15 years who've been living in a house together working on this kind of stuff like shorthand weirdos.

Like people living in a, I want to, I'll say people living in a bubble interact with media in America. And boy, if the past, however many years of American politics haven't been a similar experience of our politics becoming defined by this group of people. I call it the 15 to 20% which is much larger than people working in AI who defined the conflict in America become obsessive over the twists and turns. And then every, like, come election time, especially presidential elections are shocked to learn that people in the rest of the country view the world far differently from the way that they did.

Even politicians whose job it is to track this kind of stuff in part, I mean, it's to govern, but also, you know, get elected and so track public opinion. I mean, if there's anything that's less unpopular than AI, quote unquote, while it's a wrong, but like, less unpopular still, it's data centers specifically almost. And so many politicians have gotten caught flatfooted on that issue. Greg Abbott says Texas is grounds zero for the AI revolution. Josh Shapiro touts the biggest investment in the state in AI. And then, and both of them have flipped and they said, nope, we're pausing.

We need to make sure that things don't get out of hand. We want to ensure that these development companies are producing their own electricity off the grid. We want to do all of these reviews to make it whatever. Now, Republicans in Texas saying, we need to do environmental reviews to see how this is going to affect water. That's a you turn of significant proportions.

“And is reaction to something that is that is happening like, do you this is grassroots politics kind of 101?”

How, I mean, how does that, you know, I think it's interesting to reflect on that like how often people get it wrong when they try to either do business or politics.

You're towards a country of 340 million people and step in it.

But I'm curious how this all works itself out like within the two parties, right? Because to make a question out of this. Trump is operation warp speed in early 2020. He wants backs, backs, backs, backs, backs, backs, backs. Because that's kind of what the public wants. But at and we're all looking at all of this polling Americans are so worried about COVID, whatever. Ultimately, we can end up getting basically divided 50 50 on COVID with like these pretty kind of extreme camps in either direction. And what feels nuance and what feels bipartisan and what feels like this grounds well of concern gets sorted through a two party system that does what two party systems do with those kinds of concerns.

I mean, but the thing about the AI issue that is I think so confounding to everyone in America is that it's not an American issue. It's just like, I mean, not to sound like the cheeseball here. It's like a literal human issue. And so to COVID COVID right exactly, but like to stop, you know, I've heard just stops just slow down progress to, you know,

But I think the idea of like internationally, how do we slow it?

It feels like if there were ever a time in the world where we would get together and cooperate and come by over something, it's like not now and people have said like, we should form like IAEA inspection equivalence, right? Like someone should people, these, there should be these unafiliated researchers who go in and are safety. And like I'm like sure great, but like who's going to broker that because it doesn't seem like the US, it doesn't seem like China. And I mean, China has their own conservative as reclining episode on this this week, friend of the friend of the, friend of the pod and a few, you know, but

yeah, I'm not so sure that China wants unregulated AI models either. I mean, they have much more restrictions on speech, for example, and they want to maintain one party leadership. They're way to the social aspect, yeah. And they think we're the ones who are being irresponsible, but but you look, I don't think this is going to polarize quite in the same way that COVID did. I mean, COVID was uniquely famously difficult because you had these two terrible alternatives, shutting society down for months at a time is extraordinarily harmful.

Hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying is extraordinarily harmful.

And, and well, the question we're going to argue about that, but with with AI, like, I mean, could you hear what I think you, on non-ideal extremes with AI, which is, but like, totally unregulated and shut everything down.

“And to be honest, that's what I'm hearing right now from Trump and Sanders, right?”

From Trump, I'm hearing shut the fuck up, everything's fine. You have a high, you president, full seam ahead we need to be China. And then what I'm hearing from Sanders is shut it all down, stop building the data centers, put a pause on where we are right now, pursue jail time of 20 years for anyone who tries to pursue superintelligence in a rogue manner. No, I mean, so I am that ability starting to see too pretty extreme.

But here comes another question.

I mean, like, genuine question.

Is that extreme? Like, how do you still die there? I mean, I know, but I'm, I guess I'm asking like, this is a real open question. Like, is that, is the banning Sanders proposal of shut it down? Is that realistic?

“I think government takeover is plausible, maybe even likely at some time interval.”

I'm not sure what interval. But, you know, if you were working on a private lab on a nuclear weapons or technology, say, could kill all of humanity, of course the government would take that over. You know, I think also kind of death by a thousand cuts through like lawsuits and things like that. So there's a whole debate about like, well, are the AI lab leaders being self-interested in causing calling for regulation?

There are dumb versions of that argument. There are better versions of that argument. But like, if they have any people advising them on the politics at all, they have to get out in front of this, because this two to one majority against data centers against AI is before we've seen, if we see them, massive job losses. It's before we've seen, you know, if you're a silver bulletin made a we wrote about the hugging face incident yesterday,

this scary thing to people who really understand the tech.

“But you haven't seen things like a power grid getting shut down by like a rogue AI hacker, right?”

You know, I think somebody loses access to their bank account because of AI. It's like show up at the data center site and start hammering away. What do you want? Would you make us someone like Alex borne is starting this pack or whatever we want to call it? Like does that do anything?

Or is it just kind of like, I would like to run for president at some point. And here is my, you know, organization that's surfacing my name and like a high profile way. I mean, that's actually sort of where I wanted to end this conversation. So thank you. Which is 2028.

Like I think it's a little bit lead in the game for this to become the defining issue of 2026. And if it is going to affect people's views for 2026, I think it's in line with what people already feel, which is like things have gotten out of hand with prices, things have gotten out of hand with Iran and things have gotten out of hand with AI, which reminds me a lot of how people felt about Biden at the end of Biden's term except swap out AI for immigration at the southern border. Um, I think ambitious politicians are looking out this situation saying, oh fuck, like I thought I was going to be running on Medicare for all.

But what if all we're talking about in 2028 is AI, right? It's kind of like we were all talking about the Iraq War for the 2008 presidential cycle and then you get into the fall and all of a sudden there's a financial crisis and there's people like walking out of bears turns crying. So and then we're all talking about that. Um, I don't know the answer, like how do you position yourself? I would be surprised if the answer was fully Sanders like shot at the fuck down because when you look at also when you look into this polling,

there are people who a lot of people who are skeptical of AI use it in their daily lives, right?

It is most native as a pretty simple of somebody who uses it in far more than that.

For example, right?

“Because I understand how incredibly powerful this technology is because I use it for frankly pretty advanced use cases, right?”

To me, it's not like a chat bot. I don't use it for that kind of shit, right? It's like this thing, how long peanut butter can stay in the friends? This thing is important to my productivity as a small business and improves that productivity by I don't know. Twenty or thirty percent.

Most people don't have that experience, really.

But like the same things that like, I'm like, oh, wow, cool.

It can do this now. Now I can get to bed earlier and I'm not going to have to, you know, stay until 2 in the morning grinding on this program. But the same things that make me excited about it may be worried.

“Like, what if this thing gets 2x better within six months again, then where's that project out to?”

Can I make you focus on the politics again, just really quick, as we are here. It's so hard not to focus on it. Focus, focus, focus. But the question was about 2020, which I meant to say, like I used you as an example of maybe that was wrong, but which is to say, there are a lot of people who find this useful who are also skeptical of it.

And so I think basically saying, let's stop all data center development, let's pause everything.

I mean, maybe people would be fine pausing it where it is right now. What is, if you're an ambitious politician in America today, and you see yourself potentially in the White House after 2028, what is the position that you take? I mean, my quick answer is I don't know. I have a, I mean, to what you said earlier, it is rough for Josh Shapiro famously, you know, ambitious for 2028 swing state, right? Like flipping positions.

But like to go back to where in this weird plasma stage of no one knows where their partisan affiliation goes. Again, like I, why, where we're automatically framing, maybe I'll look back at what I'm about to say is like crazy a year from now. But we're automatically framing the Sanders shut it down as an extreme. But like why, right? I guess that's my open question is like, you know, are there ways to have people doing this?

Are there ways to have people still access like the chat GPT version of it? But shut down the kind of research that is having models break out of their sandboxes, right? Like, isn't there a way where you can shut down some of the, the cutting edge research until there are safety parameters while people still can use the consumer product? I mean, you have this whole open source versus closed source debate, but like to stick on the politics. And I'd say AI must broadly serve the interests of the American people.

And if it doesn't, it must be shut down, right?

“That's what I would say as a, as a stump line.”

You know, I mean, again, the benefits are growing only to a small class of people. Like it's like, well, no one will have to work again. And in fact, you know, people in Silicon Valley and the VCs won't have to work again either. The guarantee, they're not going to be living in the, you know, their hippie compound in in Palo Alto or New Zealand or wherever it was. It's going to be a lot nicer than everyone else's going to be.

Can I, can I, can I read, can I read from our fellow American Pope Leo the 14th in Magnifica, you money. I knew this moment. I knew it. I was, all right, carries out of this bottom. No, because it is actually, it is actually kind of a human, it's a humanistic,

about like, you responsible use of any eye. People should read it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. And the name of progress necessary sacrifices may begin to be justified placing the burden on the most vulnerable in the pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. That feels like a political message that's very palatable and like that politicians would use, right?

Like the common good, our common humanity, right? That's kind of what all these politicians are saying. And I'll tell you, I've gotten that exact feedback on the, on AI episodes that we've done on GD, which is, okay, all well and good, you actually didn't touch on my biggest concern, which is all of the benefits of AI are occurring to the top, or all of the benefits already are. And so again, with the whole like, data centers actually being about affordable electricity and the politics of place and having control over local environmental resources and whatever.

It's not like the data center backlash is not because people are afraid that AI is going to kill them per se. There's another concern here, which is people feel that the stratification of society along economic lines is getting completely out of control and that AI is going to exacerbate it further. Yeah, look, I put it like this. I think it's very irrational for people to have profound anxieties about AI based on what people in Silicon Valley say, AI can and will do. Is that anxiety manifested in the most coherent ways? Probably not. AI requires a lot of technical ability to understand and I'm lucky in that, um,

I mean hammering away as a data center.

Can I ask, can I ask like a loaded question to end it, which is like, where do you put, it's actually too full. It's like, where do you put the likelihood of AI killing us in the next 10 years and, like, could, could your AI's ever breakout of their sandbox and pop at the model? I, I want to say Nate's personal p-doom for like a special episode or something, because I have to think about that more.

“Yeah. We need to, we need to have like a, we'll do it. We'll be able to play that game. I, I use constraints on how I apply my AI's, right?”

So I don't actually have the desktop version intentionally. I keep them in the browser window.

There are allowed select permissions to interact with like some Google sheets, right? But I don't want to touching, I don't need anything on my Google Drive. Yeah. I let it do goes with Drive. I don't want to touching anything on my computer, because it's proprietary stuff. And by the way, I'm also a little concerned that like, it has all this really awesome code that I wrote. I guess we wrote together.

“Claude and and ChetchipiT and don't have to remove my fries. Okay.”

Like, if they're, I know, I hope they won't seal that code and train on that. Like, that's a concern as well.

So this is, I've done this many times when I like really like end-up podcast by saying, we're going to check back in. This is to be continued. This is the most to be continued conversation we've ever had amongst the three of us. And for those of you who loved, I'm looking at the camera now to those of you who loved this deep dive into

“existential dread over AI, morality, the Catholic Church, humanism.”

I'm glad you enjoyed it. We're going to get lots more into them in terms in future episodes and sort of talk about electoral politics and all that jazz. But thank you for indulging us today and thank you Nate and Claire for joining me in doing it. Thanks, Caitlin. Thanks, Caitlin. That's it for today's episode of Still Counting.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe on YouTube at youtube.com at Still Counting podcast. We back next Wednesday evening for another episode. Still Counting is a crooked media production. Our team includes Saul Rubin, Emily Four, Claudia Scheng, Charlotte Landes, Retroland, Johanna Kays, Ben Heskot, Matthew Groat, Katie Long, and Adrian Hell. Our music is made for each master's cylinder. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the writers guild of America East.