Dean Ball on Who Should Control AI
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player
We will not govern AI without AI. Um, that's a weird fact, but it's like also kind of trivially obvious if you think about other general-purpose technologies. Imagine trying to govern computers without computers. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. There are so many things going on in the world at the moment, but it is hard to keep track.
We had a great episode with Francis Fukuyama trying to understand the escalating conflict in the Middle East. I invite you to listen back to that episode if you haven't yet. But the big thing that was going on just before this war started was the extraordinary conflict between Entropic, the maker of Claude, one of the Frontier AI labs, and the organization formerly known as the Department of Defense, now known as the Department of War. There was a very public, extraordinary conflict over whether Anthropic was going to be allowed to limit the way in which the Pentagon uses its technology and the Trump administration retaliated in a very extreme way against Entropic when they were not willing to budge on their red lines. Today in the podcast we have two snippets of a conversation with somebody who really knows a lot about this.
Dean Ball is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and writes the excellent newsletter Hyper Dimensional. He was also the senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence and emerging technology at the White House, where he was the primary staff drafter of America's AI action plan under Donald Trump. In a lot of this conversation, we had a broad discussion about how to think about public policy in the age of AI.
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