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Atlantic Intelligence
A CULTURE-WAR TEST FOR AI
Do both candidates secretly agree on the technology?
By Damon Beres
Illustration by The Atlantic
November 1, 2024, 2:19 PM ET
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This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap
your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Did someone
forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.
You might think, given the extreme pronouncements that are regularly voiced by
Silicon Valley executives, that AI would be a top issue for Kamala Harris and
Donald Trump. Tech titans have insisted that AI will change everything—perhaps
the nature of work most of all. Truck drivers and lawyers alike may see aspects
of their profession automated before long. But although Harris and Trump have
had a lot to say about jobs and the economy, they haven’t spoken much on the
campaign trail about AI.
As my colleague Matteo Wong wrote yesterday, that may be because this is the
rare issue that the two actually agree on. Presidential administrations have
steadily built AI policy since the Barack Obama years; Trump and Joe Biden both
worked “to grow the federal government’s AI expertise, support private-sector
innovation, establish standards for the technology’s safety and reliability,
lead international conversations on AI, and prepare the American workforce for
potential automation,” Matteo writes.
But there is a wrinkle. Trump and his surrogates have recently lashed out
against supposedly “woke” and “Radical Leftwing” AI policies supported by the
Biden administration—even though those policies directly echo executive orders
on the technology that Trump signed himself. Partisanship threatens to halt
years of bipartisan momentum, though there’s still a chance that reason will
prevail.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Illustration by The Atlantic
SOMETHING THAT BOTH CANDIDATES SECRETLY AGREE ON
By Matteo Wong
If the presidential election has provided relief from anything, it has been the
generative-AI boom. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has made much of the
technology in their public messaging, and they have not articulated particularly
detailed AI platforms. Bots do not seem to rank among the economy, immigration,
abortion rights, and other issues that can make or break campaigns.
But don’t be fooled. Americans are very invested, and very worried, about the
future of artificial intelligence. Polling consistently shows that a majority of
adults from both major parties support government regulation of AI, and that
demand for regulation might even be growing. Efforts to curb AI-enabled
disinformation, fraud, and privacy violations, as well as to support
private-sector innovation, are under way at the state and federal levels.
Widespread AI policy is coming, and the next president may well steer its
direction for years to come.
Read the full article.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WHAT TO READ NEXT
* The slop candidate: “In his own way, Trump has shown us all the limits of
artificial intelligence,” Charlie Warzel writes.
* The near future of deepfakes just got way clearer: “India’s election was ripe
for a crisis of AI misinformation,” Nilesh Christopher wrote in June. “It
didn’t happen.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
P.S.
Speaking of election madness, many people will be closely watching the results
not just because they’re anxious about the future of the republic but also
because they have a ton of money on the line. “On Polymarket, perhaps the most
popular political-betting site, people have wagered more than $200 million on
the outcome of the U.S. presidential election,” my colleague Lila Shroff wrote
in a story for The Atlantic yesterday. So-called prediction markets “sometimes
describe themselves as ‘truth machines,’” Lila writes. “But that’s a challenging
role to assume when Americans can’t agree on what the basic truth even is.”
— Damon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Damon Beres is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology
section.
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