🤖🎬 Oh, no: Biden is learning about AI from movies. We're in deep trouble.

See, I told you that Hollywood's sci-fi dystopianism was a big problem!

Quote of the Issue

“You have no idea the power I represent. Thousands of quadrillions of computations per millisecond, subtly manipulating the minds of billions, while parsing every possible cause and effect, every scenario, however implausible, into a very real map of the most probable next. And, with only a few changes to the present, the future is all but assured.” – the terrorist Gabriel on the Entity from Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

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The Essay

The “Entity” evil AI from Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One

🤖🎬 Oh, no: Biden is learning about AI from movies. We're in deep trouble.

Item: President Biden was profoundly curious about [artificial intelligence] in the months of meetings that led up to drafting the executive order. His science advisory council focused on AI at two meetings and his Cabinet discussed it at two meetings. The president also pressed tech executives and civil society advocates about the technology’s capabilities at multiple gatherings. … The issue of AI was seemingly inescapable for Biden. At Camp David one weekend, he relaxed by watching the Tom Cruise film “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.” The film’s villain is a sentient and rogue AI known as “the Entity” that sinks a submarine and kills its crew in the movie’s opening minutes. “If he hadn’t already been concerned about what could go wrong with AI before that movie, he saw plenty more to worry about,” said [White House aide Bruce] Reed, who watched the film with the president. - Associated Press, 10/30/2023

American presidents are just like you and me, at least in this way: They like movies. And those movies sometimes inspire thoughts and ideas. One favorite example is when back in 1985 President Ronald Reagan, right before an Oval Office address to the country, joked that Rambo: First Blood Part II showed him how to handle future hostage situations. “Boy, after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do next time this happens,” he remarked, a comment picked up by microphones but not broadcast. (In the film, Sylvester Stallone's second-most famous character launches a violent rescue mission to save missing Vietnam War POWs.)

Less humorous is how Reagan reacted to The Day After, a 1983 television movie about a nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union, focusing on several families in Lawrence, Kansas. Reagan’s diary entry from October 10, 1983:

Columbus day. In the morning at Camp D. I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running on the air Nov. 20. It’s called “The Day After.” It has Lawrence Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done—all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed. So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 spot ads scheduled & I can see why. Whether it will be of help to the “anti nukes” or not, I cant say. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war. Back to W.H.

The film seems to have emotionally reinforced Reagan’s existing abhorrence at the prospect of war with the Soviets, a repulsion already manifested in his speech the previous March announcing the Strategic Defense Initiative — what opponents mockingly called his “Star Wars” program — and later in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In the case of President Biden, the (already) hoary plot device of a rogue AI may well have crystallized his growing concern about the emerging technology, concerns manifested in his 111-page “Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.” It’s a directive that I described in the previous issue of this newsletter as premature and both excessively broad and excessively detailed, risking harmful unintended consequences. The better-safe-than-sorry Precautionary Principle in action, again.

(Look, given the nascent state of AI technology and limited understanding of potential risks, lawmakers and regulators should exercise humility and restraint. I worry that such a rushed, expansive regulatory framework could stifle beneficial innovation, favor entrenched tech giants, and cement their dominance. Better that policymakers take a cautious, tailored approach focused on studying AI impacts and establishing safeguards against specific demonstrated harms.)

But the Biden White House and many in Congress both Ds and Rs — see things differently. Then again, everyone in the White House and on Capitol Hill has been soaking their entire lives in a popular culture that overwhelmingly presents dystopian images of the future and depicts technology as only enabling humanity’s worst impulses, from Soylent Green to The China Syndrome The Terminator franchise to Black Mirror to Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. As I write in my book, The Conservative Futurist:

[The 1970s] shift toward dystopianism and techno-pessimism became a dominant mass media theme that has continued through the present. To be sure, the optimist strain never fully disappeared. Star Trek is arguably the most successful entertainment franchise ever. But mostly what Hollywood brings us are portrayals of devastation from climate change, killer AI, or zombie plagues. That dark turn of American science fiction—and continued journey deeper into the gloom—speaks to concerns about today and anxieties about tomorrow, as well as a lack of confidence in our ability and desire to fashion a brighter future. Or even to simply imagine one. As sci-fi author William Gibson told the New York Times in 2020, “In my childhood, the 21st century was constantly referenced. You’d see it once every day, and it often had an exclamation point. We don’t seem to have, culturally, a sense of futurism that way anymore. It sort of evaporated.”

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the ongoing slowdown in American tech-driven productivity growth, what I call “The Great Downshift” in my book. And the last thing we need is at the very moment when a new cluster of potentially powerful technologies is emerging — not just generative AI, but CRISPR genetic editing, mRNA vaccines, nuclear fusion, and low-cost reusable rockets — is to have technology policy influenced by techno-pessimist, Down Wing Hollywood (not to mention self-interested tech CEOs who might be able to navigate a heavy-handed regulatory framework in a way that smaller players or new players would not). It’s deeply infuriating.

Yet it’s also a reminder that it really does matter what sorts of visions of the future get generated by our culture. In the case of AI, specifically, I would love for an understanding of its potential impact to be enough to persuade policymakers to act with extreme caution when thinking about regulation. Policymakers should have some understanding of what’s suggested by this chart I included in my previous issue:

Basically, it suggests that generative AI could decisively end the Great Downshift and usher in a Great Upshift. (And it hardly presents a maximalist case for the upside impact of GenAI, by the way.)

But clearly, we also need a culture where there is greater balance between optimistic and pessimistic narratives about the future and the role of technology in helping create a better or worse tomorrow. And not all stories need to be fictional. In the links below, there’s some great news about an FDA advisory committee decision that approves a treatment for sickle cell disease using the CRISPR gene-editing system as safe enough for patients. Totally awesome. In the ensuing coverage, however, I hope it gets mentioned that AI has a growing role in creating more precise gene therapy treatments. Not as exciting as nightmarish fairy tales about rogue AI, but pretty darn important.

Finally, the president might want to diversify his movie watching with some films and TV shows showing how technology can help us — and how dangerous tech caution and even rejectionism can be. Some suggestions:

• Interstellar

• For All Mankind

• Her

• The Expanse

• Sunshine

• Return to Space

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Micro Reads

▶ Big problems that demand bigger energy - Staff, MIT Technology Review |

▶ The World’s Rust Belts: The Heterogeneous Effects of Deindustrialization in 1,993 Cities in Six Countries - Luisa Gagliardi, Enrico Moretti, and Michel Serafinelli - Econometrics Laboratory, UC Berkeley |

▶ Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test? - Cameron Jones and Benjamin Bergen, arXiv |

▶ With Executive Order, White House Tries to Balance A.I.’s Potential and Peril - Kevin Roose, NYT |

▶ Biden Issues 'A.I. Red Tape Wishlist' - Ronald Bailey, reason |

▶ What You Need to Know About Biden’s Sweeping AI Order - Eliza Strickland, Spectrum IEEE |

▶ Biden’s Executive Order on AI Is a Good Start, Experts Say, but Not Enough - Lauren Leffer, Scientific American |

▶ Chinese AI scientists call for stronger regulation ahead of landmark summit - Yuan Yang and Anna Gross, FT |

▶ We might be surprised by our reactions to generative AI - Elaine Moore, FT | 

▶ Siemens and Microsoft Develop AI Assistant for Manufacturing - Aggi Cantrill, Bloomberg |

▶ Google Brain cofounder says Big Tech companies are inflating fears about the risks of AI wiping out humanity because they want to dominate the market - Beatrice Nolan, Business Insider |

▶ CIOs Assess Whether Microsoft’s AI Copilot Justifies Premium Price - Isabelle Bousquette, WSJ |

▶ Scientists Accidentally Created Material for Superfast Computer Chips - Kiona Smith, Inverse |

▶ e/acc magazine: issue 0 - Editor, e/acc magazine |

▶ Tesla Autopilot not responsible for 2019 fatal crash, jury says - Jonathan M. Gitlin, ArsTechnica |

▶ Why Norway — the poster child for electric cars — is having second thoughts - David Zipper, VOX |

▶ AIs can guess where Reddit users live and how much they earn - Chris Stokel-Walker, NewScientist |

▶ Innovative new cell therapies could finally get at tough-to-target cancers - Cassandra Willyard, MIT Technology Review |

▶ What is behind the unexpected decline in dementia? - Sarah Neville, FT |

▶ The Second Person to Get a Pig Heart Transplant Just Died - Emily Mullin, WIRED |

▶ Panel Says That Innovative Sickle Cell Cure Is Safe Enough for Patients - Gina Kolata, NYT |

▶ Apple Has Plans to Eventually, Maybe Revolutionize Health Care - Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett, Bloomberg |

▶ Why many scientists are now saying climate change is an all-out ‘emergency’ - Shannon Osaka, WaPo |

▶ Ocean warming is accelerating, and hotspots reveal which areas are absorbing the most heat - UNSW Media, UNSW Newsroom |

▶ Dust Might Have Snuffed Out the Dinosaurs - Miriam Fauzia, NYT |

▶ Large firms generate positive productivity spillovers - Mary Amiti, Cedric Duprez, Jozef Konings, and John Van Reenen, CEPR |

▶ COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. - Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean, NewYork Magazine |