America’s AI Action Plan
The further development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is safely left to Big Tech, climate change is not a problem the current generation should address, and neither AI nor climate change are human rights concerns. If you believe this much, the new American AI Action Plan along with executive orders (EOs) on Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack, Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure, and Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government will be good news. Equally welcome will be the administration's concurrent efforts to undermine the legal basis on which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) combats climate change, as well as its efforts to force the European Union to acquire exorbitant amounts of American fossil fuels.
But suppose you do believe there should be appropriate governmental and indeed societal oversight over what the private sector does with AI, that this generation does have a responsibility to combat climate change, and that doing all this is a human rights matter. Then you might well think of these developments as more evidence that this administration takes enormous risks with human flourishing, including the flourishing of Americans. You will probably also think this administration neither cares about future generations, nor about partnerships around the world, nor even about bringing along much of the country.
Instead, what you might well see is how this administration imagines the emerging world order. My purpose is to argue that this vision should concern us: a world in which the U.S. and China are major competitors, but the U.S. has a decisive edge; the U.S. treats countries in its orbit as customers at best and client states at worst; AI becomes critical to the American economy—both domestically and for exports—while its large-scale deployment advances what Shoshana Zuboff has aptly termed Surveillance Capitalism, a version of capitalism driven by collecting and mining data; the energy needed to drive the American AI Empire largely comes from fossil fuels, whose sale to other countries is a major source of revenues; and behind all this is something that has become an ever-present feature of how this administration operates—gaslighting as a way of making those fall in line who do not comply, here by way of accusing them of building AI that fails to be “ideologically neutral.” But as the EO on “woke AI” reveals, “ideologically neutral” is AI that reflects the worldview of this administration. Human rights do not appear in this brave new world.
You might also recall the prominent appearance of Tech bosses at Trump’s inauguration—some months before one such boss’s lavish wedding in Venice threw a spotlight on the excessive wealth differences that prevail in our ailing world. Whatever investments Big Tech has made to curry favor, they are paying off: Big Tech gets deregulation, export support, and lenient rules around training data. The U.S. already hosts about 75% of global compute capacity, followed by China’s 15%. (Also see here.) Part of the Action Plan is to make others choose between America’s AI Empire and committing the “unforced error” of joining its rivals. (For a broadly-based appeal to create a People’s Action Plan on AI instead, see here; for reactions by the Council on Foreign Relations, see here.)
