Who is the Better Candidate for AI?

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, two op-eds about why either of the presidential candidates is the better for artificial intelligence. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes.

0:24Hello, friends. It is finally time. The U.S. presidential elections are, after many long months, coming to a head this week. And so this week for Long Read Sunday, I'm pulling two dueling op-eds published in Newsweek about why Kamala Harris on the one hand or Donald Trump on the other would be the better choice for artificial intelligence. The first essay is by Amy Fields Meyer, a former senior policy advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris, and is called Kamala Harris is the right president for the age of AI. I'm going to kick it over to AI me now from 11 Labs to read this piece. Kamala Harris is the right president for the age of AI vertical bar opinion.

1:00California Governor Gavin Newsom recently halted controversial legislation that would have required safety testing for some artificial intelligence, AI, models before their public release. One takeaway? Regulating this high-stakes technology may simply be too big a task for state governments. Governing AI will require a national effort led by decisive leaders, including America's next president. I have seen firsthand how one candidate thinks about AI. As Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris, I saw up close how the Democratic nominee for president approaches this complex issue.

1:31She is studious and scrutinizing, thorough and pragmatic, skeptical of dogma, and focused on results. As in everything she does, her primary concern is the real day-to-day experiences of people. One moment from my White House tenure illustrates this approach. Months after powerful new tools like ChatGPT had set off seismic waves of angst in Washington and beyond, Harris gathered a small group of consumer advocates and labor leaders in her office to discuss artificial intelligence. She wanted to hear firsthand about how regular people were grappling with the fast-moving technology. I watched as the vice president surveyed the leaders, asking each what most worried their constituents—workers, patients, older Americans, students, women.

2:08They voiced concern about how AI surveillance systems surveilled and scored factory workers, how rogue algorithms had kicked sick patients off their healthcare benefits, how scammers had bilked thousands of dollars from seniors by using tech to impersonate their grandchildren's voices, and how teenage girls had been devastated after their faces were imposed on explicit deepfake images. Harris was well acquainted with these issues. As California's Attorney General, she had established the country's first privacy protection unit, prosecuting hackers who stole and sold intimate images online, and striking a global agreement with top tech platforms to adopt new rules for protecting users' personal information.

2:42As the meeting wound down, the Vice President made a promise. She would do all she could to ensure that pioneering technologies empowered, and did not harm, Americans. In the months that followed, the vice president worked across the government to tackle the problems raised in that meeting. President Joe Biden developed and then signed an executive order addressing problems with tenant screening algorithms, automated worker surveillance tools, and synthetic content like voice cloning. These initiatives, alongside the administration's efforts to maintain America's AI edge over China and give small businesses the resources to compete in the emerging AI market, responded directly to the concerns of the person who had been listening in that meeting with civil society leaders, the vice president of the United States.

3:19I thought back to this chapter last month as Harris laid out a detailed agenda to make life better for the U.S. middle class. The daughter of a research scientist, the vice president spent some of her formative years living and working in the Bay Area, the cradle of American innovation. She often shares how these experiences showed her the power of technology to help solve humanity's most complex problems, from curing stubborn diseases to strengthening America's national defense. At the same time, she has warned that without clear guardrails, such tools can fall short of their potential. This approach, an innovation-forward, people-centered balancing act, has come alive in Harris' record on technology issues as vice president.

3:54Last November, she rallied world leaders around a vision for AI that ensures privacy is protected and people have equal access to opportunity. The speech followed her behind-the-scenes work with tech CEOs to secure voluntary safety commitments that would not stifle the technology's extraordinary potential to shape and improve the world around us. The efforts Harris has championed could serve as the basis of the kind of safe business environment for the U.S. AI sector the vice president has promised on the stump, unless a second Trump administration torpedoes them. The former president vowed in his 2024 platform to roll back safety measures and rigorous national security safeguards the current administration has achieved.

4:28What would he replace them with? Not much, per reporting in the Washington Post. Trump allies have drawn up plans to let AI industry players grade their own homework, paving the way for the kind of technology crisis that would deal a blow to the trust already skeptical consumers have in these systems. To workers, startup founders, and others navigating the profound implications of this evolving class of technology, Trump's message is, you're on your own. We can't know the course advanced technology will take in the next four years. But as the role of AI in daily life accelerates, America's next president will grapple with its impact on our safety, security, and social fabric.

5:02Working families don't have to wonder how President Harris will handle these challenges. She has already shown us. She will listen to regular people and then she will act.

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6:15There is a huge challenge, however, of going from the potential of AI to actually capturing that value. And that gap is what Superintelligent is dedicated to filling. Superintelligent accelerates AI adoption and engagement to help teams actually use AI to increase productivity and drive business value. An interactive AI use case registry gives your company full visibility into how people are using artificial intelligence right now. Pair that with capabilities building content in the form of tutorials, learning paths, and a use case library. And Superintelligent helps people inside your company show how they're getting value out of AI while providing resources for people to put that inspiration into action.

6:51The next three teams that sign up with 100 or more seats are going to get free embedded consulting. That's a process by which our super intelligent team sits with your organization, figures out the specific use cases that matter most to you, and helps actually ensure support for adoption of those use cases to drive real value. Go to bsuper.ai to learn more about this AI enablement network. And now, back to the show. Next up, we turn to John L. Evans, the president of Promising People, with the piece titled, Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump is the Clear Choice on AI. Back to AI and LW now. Donald Trump is the clear choice on AI vertical bar opinion.

7:30The Trump campaign is focusing on ways to fix our country, including the use of artificial intelligence, AI solutions for a number of reasons. AI is being used to improve education, healthcare, scientific research, data, automation, drug discovery, sustainability, manufacturing, retail business, banking, customer service, and prison recidivism, a topic that President Donald Trump has spoken out about the need to reduce. In 2018, his administration announced support for legislative action to reduce recidivism and called on Congress to act. The president also successfully signed the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice bill in December that year to improve criminal justice outcomes, as well as to reduce the size of the federal prison population while also creating mechanisms to maintain public safety.

8:11As president, Trump displayed his commitment to strengthening American leadership in AI, recognizing its importance for the economy and national security. Trump issued the first-ever national AI strategy, committed to doubling AI research investment, set up the first ever national AI research institutes, launched the first AI regulatory guidance, created new international AI alliances, and set up guidance for federal use of AI. In 2019, Trump signed the first ever executive order on AI called the American AI Initiative. The pillars of that order were to create resources, redirect funding, retrain workers, establish standards, and engage internationally.

8:45President Trump also signed a second executive order promoting the use of trustworthy AI in the federal government before he left office. The order featured policies that carried over into the Biden administration. It encouraged federal agencies to continue to use AI when appropriate to benefit the American people. Most importantly, the order said that ongoing adoption and acceptance of AI would depend significantly on public trust. Agencies would be required to use AI in a manner that fosters public trust and confidence while protecting privacy, civil rights, civil liberties, and American values, consistent with applicable law and the goals of Executive Order 13859.

9:21On the contrary, the Biden administration simply issued an executive order on AI that Trump has vowed to reverse once elected. Biden's order, signed in the fall of 2023, contained a list of to-do items for federal agencies and AI designers, including requirements for developers of dual-use foundation models to share safety test results and other information with the government under the Defense Production Act. Trump and the Republican National Committee, RNC, have called the order dangerous, stating it will stifle innovation and impose radical liberal ideas. Regarding the Harris campaign's AI strategy, Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wrote a letter last month questioning the Biden-Harris administration's collaboration with the RAND Corporation.

10:00As a massive think tank with strong Silicon Valley relationships, Senator Cruz pointed out that RAND not only helped draft the Biden-Harris artificial intelligence executive order, but has also been a proponent of efforts by the government to censor online speech. His letter also described how RAND and left-wing groups have placed AI staffers in federal agencies. Beyond that, the letter detailed the same tech billionaire donors are financially backing the Harris' campaign, raising flags about potential conflicts of interest with AI regulation. Trump's vice presidential pick J.D. Vance has taken a strong stance on AI policy and the need to limit regulation in a Senate hearing back in July.

10:36Vance has bona fide credentials in venture capital. The guy sees it. When AI is fully functioning, productivity can start to skyrocket, the likes of which we have never seen. And it's axiomatic, when productivity increases, prices fall. Look no further than LASIK eye surgery. As tech advanced the procedure in these last decades, prices plummeted and quality of service improved. As a consultant with a global firm investing in strategies that leverage AI, I've seen firsthand the economic benefits of innovation. Such benefits include a water purification system that relies on the power of AI and its potential for improving the lives of countless people worldwide.

11:10Naturally, businesses should prefer a regulatory environment that catalyzes innovation, instead of stymieing this indispensable phenomenon. The choice is clear. President Trump would take America forward into the future of AI. The alternative would be a continuation of the current administration's desire to stifle innovation and increase censorship. All right, and now we are back to the real non-artificial intelligence, me. And the first thing I will say is, given that these essays were in Newsweek, I would suggest that these are both unbelievably unconvincing arguments. Luckily, I find their unconvincingness in decent proportion, so at least they have that sort of balance right.

11:47But basically, the essay in favor of Harris effectively says that the industry needs to be reined in, and that the needs of regular people need to be considered when it comes to AI, and Kamala is going to be better for that. Roughly speaking, the pro-Trump essay says we gotta just let AI do its thing, because when productivity increases, prices fall. Although it kind of spends a lot of time making the argument by ragging on Biden. Now, there was another piece I didn't read by Thomas Friedman, who also argued for Kamala in a piece called A Harris Presidency is the Only Way to Stay Ahead of AI. And basically, the big underlying argument in that piece is that the challenge of AI is going to be immense.

12:23One thing I think is very clear, and this is why you're seeing multiple op-eds about who would be better or worse for this particular area, is that artificial intelligence is massively in the national agenda. This will be one of the defining issues of the next president, no matter who it is. It will be a technology issue, an economy issue, a society issue. It'll be a geopolitics issue. It'll be a military issue. There will absolutely be big differences, depending on whether it is a Democrat or a Republican who sits in the White House when it comes to AI policy. However, there are arguments that it might be less different than it might have seemed about a year ago.

12:58The most recent White House discourse on AI was, of course, the big memo that made it clear that it was a massive national security priority. We saw this earlier in the year with the Chuck Schumer-led recommendations around AI policy as well that really put the emphasis on American leadership and American innovation. There might be some nuance to how it's enacted, but it is very clear that right now, and increasingly on both sides of the aisle, leading in innovation and American supremacy in the technology is the most important concern. Whether that changes with the next president, we will have to see, but it is a pretty fascinating topic going into what will be an exciting and or dramatic and or chaotic next week.

13:35I hope you all enjoy the show. For now, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Until next time, peace.