This site is about imagining the future. A future where AI plays a crucial role. To help imagine that, I to expand the thinking about AI with some lessons from social science.
In a previous post, I pointed to 5 features of political decision making that might not be obvious to someone approaching from a rational-technical field.
This is a follow-up post, suggesting some strategies for success.
“Back in the days”, I was one of the first people on Facebook in my social circle. It was… cool. The questions, the buzz, the energy. Being an early adopter was something to show.
I am also among the first to use AI tools in my work. Butthis time, the climate is changed.
Last weekend I worked on analysing a legislative proposal the government submitted. As is often the case, the proposal lists the modifications by referring to specific laws’ specific words. Meaning that every line - going beyond a page — would require identifying exactly which law it references and what that often but one word change would mean. Before having access to AI, this task would have taken days. (Actually, it wouldn’t have, as I would never have started it.) With an AI assistant, I was done in an hour. I did not have to spend the day tracking down what a modified paragraph refers to or which older text it replaces — I could spend the hour on what the changes actually do. And I could even write a post on it.
Having more time for analysis, producing more content, learning more. Who could possibly make the argument that this is a bad thing?
Yet, if I emphasised the research was done by AI, the paper would immediately be dismissed, and my reputation would suffer. All the while all those making these judgments are also using this technology.
Consider this: the reputation, the popularity of AI is such that people do not confess to using it. In academics especially, it has become cool to not use AI. This is the position from which the intelligence explosion, the super intelligence, and all those other issues will be debated.
1. Follow the People
If the voter is king, then anyone wanting to influence the politicians making the decision needs to engage with the politicians’ constituents. No one ever won a popular contest just by standing by — certainly not in an age when companies in every field of marketing, and politicians too, target voters consciously.
And the AI community finds itself in a position where it needs to defend a whole regime, whereas the opponent can point at incidents. This is the structurally difficult communication situation.
Because something people use every day does not build a constituency. It is only registered when there is some sort of problem. Have you ever written your electricity company expressing your thanks for having had power during the day — and the day before and before that.
Or have you ever seen such a letter?
I am writing to you to express my deepest thanks. Your technology allowed me to cross the ocean, fly far above the skies with speeds I can hardly comprehend. The technology that lets us fly is truly unique. It has changed the world profoundly.
It’s no accident I use this example. The distance between the importance of the technology and the nonchalance of its public perception calls for the absurd. The more we end up using AI, the more mundane it might become, the less transformative it could be perceived on an everyday level.
But it doesn’t need to stay this way. I personally believe the window for majority support of AI development has passed — but a constituency can be built for sensible debate. The technology has winners, and there are people genuinely interested in it. All it takes is that they enter the arena.
AI companies are spending billions to make sure their new models learn everything humans have ever said. Maybe it is also possible to listen to these humans.
2. Simpler!
Politicians don’t like nuance — that, everybody knows. Every message needs to be simplified.
Which requires that there is a message that answers questions like this:
Why are we building AI?
Is it really going to take my job?
Why do those CEOs get so rich?
And while these questions are not answered, there is an ongoing threat narrative
AI is not like us and might kill us.
It takes our jobs.
It makes Silicon Valley executives intolerably rich.
Now, we can go down a number of narrative avenues:
It doesn’t threaten us — it defends us, making sure our children won’t have to write with Chinese characters.
It doesn’t take jobs — it will create many more.
Those jobs will be more comfortable; we will live longer and work less.
Any one of these avenues could carry the whole case.
Some of these arguments have already been built. In Isaac Asimov’s “Robbie,” a little girl becomes so attached to the robot that her mother is outraged and replaces it with a dog. The girl is heartbroken. In the last scene, at the robot factory, the girl is almost run over by a lorry, and the only creature fast enough to save her is the robot. Now, if you find it didactic — after all, who could ever imagine R2-D2 creating existential risk or taking anyone’s job? Really? I’ll take it.
CUTE AI
After all — to further complicate the image — R2-D2 could easily replace the Terminator as the AI community’s default nightmare. Maybe if R2-D2 were discussed as often as the T-800, the numbers would be different.
3. Understand that politicians decide by position
You have to think about simplified arguments to the voter, but you also need to understand the register in which politicians will decide. These registers are not policy-based and not argument-based, but position-based. Politicians frame every question in pro and contra: whose interest? Do I win? Do I lose? Every question is read in the logic of the trade.
A position is not a policy. A libertarian fights for lower taxes; someone who wants better social services is usually fine with raising them. Notice: the goal is not a specific number. Nobody’s position is that the tax should be 20 percent or 15 percent. In Denmark the low-tax side fights at 40 percent; in the US, at 20. And when the Danish side gets its number down, it does not say: well, this was enough, we are done fighting. It fights for the next cut, because the position was never the number. The position is the direction.
Very often, a position is association. Thousands of political campaign ads do nothing else than try to highlight a relationship between an unpopular person and the candidate they oppose — or as they say in the trade: “tie them to him!” I won’t go into detail on how the unpopularity of the AI companies and their leaders therefore impacts every pro-AI position.
4. Pass the test of common sense
Every argument, once simplified, still has to pass one more test: the test of common sense.
I wrote about common sense in Part One. It is a set of standing rules people apply before any argument arrives — and it is very often wrong. It is also difficult to define, but easy to recognize. These statements meet the demands of common sense:
I don’t do something that could kill me.
If something will hurt me, I don’t help it along.
If everybody doing something gets rich from it, then that is why they are doing it.
Every one of these rules currently returns a verdict against AI, and nobody had to construct an argument to get there.
And the test applies to arguments about the future as well — not on whether the future will happen, but on whether people will believe it when told. Whether the American population believes there will be a deal with China in three years is a very different question from whether there will be a deal with China in three years. The first question is where the common sense test sits. Arguments can be correct predictions and still fail it.
And we need to be aware that, because of increasing cynicism, anything appealing to enlightened self-interest — the other side acting reasonably, restraint because it serves everyone — will probably no longer pass the common sense test at all.
5. Be prepared for the big change
Politics is mostly incremental. It ignores a problem for years, and then, after one sufficiently large shock, it does things that were unthinkable the year before.
Hoover faced the Depression inside the paradigm of his era: government does not intervene, budgets stay balanced, prosperity returns on its own. Roosevelt did the impossible — closed every bank in the country, took the dollar off gold, put the federal government directly into hiring and industry — the exact things the entire American political class had agreed government must never do.
Truman did the impossible to a hundred and fifty years of foreign policy doctrine. America had held to Washington’s rule — no entangling alliances — through two world wars. Then it rebuilt Europe with thirteen billion dollars, signed the first peacetime alliance in its history, and within ten years extended its nuclear shield over Germany: American cities put at risk to protect the country that had been the enemy a decade before.
Britain in 1832 had an electoral map frozen for centuries — rotten boroughs with a dozen voters sending two MPs while Manchester, a city of over a hundred thousand, sent none. Reform had been blocked for fifty years; the Duke of Wellington declared the system could not possibly be improved. Then revolution broke out in France, riots spread across England, and the impossible passed within two years.
And we Europeans have watched our own Union, within a decade and a half, respond to one existential crisis after another — the currency, the banks, a member leaving, a war on our border — each time with action that had been declared legally and politically impossible right up until the day it was taken.
Now apply this to AI. The AI community’s own claim is that this is a major transformation — bigger than the internet, comparable to electricity. If the claim is true, the political response will eventually be of the same size. Major transformations produce impossible politics; that is what the word major means. The response will arrive fast, after a shock, and it will be built from whatever finished plans are within reach. Today there is essentially one, and it is a ban. Whoever wants a different outcome should have theirs written before the shock, not after.
AI is a miraculous technology that can truly transform our societies for the better. It would be the highest form of hubris if it went wrong because of a misunderstanding born of condescension.