It’s hard for me to think of a single constituency that would be happy about this fiasco, and indeed, DOD’s demands are deeply underwater with every single group polled, including Trump voters — only 28% of people who voted for Trump in the last two elections were in favor.
If you hate AI, you don’t want the Pentagon to seize control of it.
If you like AI, you probably don’t want the Pentagon to profoundly damage the industry and wreck investor confidence with a sudden nationalization.
If you want AI deeply enmeshed with the Pentagon, you’re probably worried this reduces the incentive for companies to work with DOD.
If you are against AI regulation, you probably don’t love the government abruptly deciding to threaten to choke an industry leader to death for no real reason.
If you’re in favor of AI regulation, you probably didn’t want the first major regulatory action to be: “You must build a killer robot.”
If you’re afraid of killer robots, you’re probably concerned that the government is trying to force a company to let them have Skynet.
Finally, the stupidest thing about all of this is that, as I read it, Anthropic is, in fact, willing to, eventually, build killer robots. In the defense space, people have been increasingly convincing themselves that we’re going to need killer robots at some point. Wars in the near future might be fought with autonomous drone swarms; those swarms might simply not have time to check in with humans between strikes. In certain circles, “we’re going to build killer robots pretty soon” has become an accepted fact.
Maybe we should all be re-reading Revelation, for whatever good THAT will do. We seem on a high-speed ride to the end of the world.
Another snippet from the article:
Maybe we should all be re-reading Revelation, for whatever good THAT will do. We seem on a high-speed ride to the end of the world.
" We seem on a high-speed ride to the end of the world."
...just the age, Pilgrim, not the world...
...hold the line Patriot...