When the Biden administration created a safety institute at the standards agency and then used it to run “x-risk evals, I think we kind of lost our way there,” he said. (“X-risk” is a shortened term for “existential risk” that’s associated with the idea that AI poses major threats to humanity.)
“To me, I think we need to go back to basics at NIST, and back to basics around what NIST exists for, and that is to promulgate best-in-class standards and do critical metrology or measurement science around AI models,” Kratsios said.
Kratsios’s comments about the body once known as the AI Safety Institute came a day after the White House released its anticipated AI Action Plan — which made dozens of recommendations to do things like deregulate and rid AI of “ideological bias” — as well as three executive orders that set parts of that plan into motion. The Thursday panel, moderated by CTA’s CEO and vice chair Gary Shapiro, was focused on those actions.
The discussion also followed the Trump administration’s move last month to rename the NIST-located safety institute to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, cutting “safety” from the name. That component was initially announced by the Biden administration in November 2023 at the UK AI Safety Summit and, over the next year, focused on working with industry, establishing testing agreements with companies, and conducting evaluations.
I get that he’s most likely just “following orders” from Thiel, and probably not coming up with any of this policy, but I still hate this guy so much. I have to give Thiel credit. Once again proving he sure knows how to craft a good public scapegoat for when things inevitably go horribly wrong.
To me, it’s too late for NIST there. China is driving the agenda in AI now, because the US took too long to get organized.
The U.S. wants to be China, even if it means repeating the same mistakes and destroying any semblance of civil liberty. We’re on a fast track, and they don’t care who they hurt or what rights they violate as long as they can feel like they won.
No, the Current U.S. Government along with the Uber rich backing don’t want to be China, they want to Collapse America and bring about a “libertarian Utopia” where you have an uncountable collection of private kingdoms owned by whoever has the money to run the “private security” of these areas.
They looked at the company towns of the 1800s and saw a moral good, and like basically everything thy do, they have openly claimed as such, but everyone ignores it, just like project 2025 in the USA, The Leaked AFD papers in Germany, the UK Leavers, etc…
That’s not what “libertarian utopia” is. Also Ayn Rand is not libertarian, more like fascist.
They want a “thief feudalism”, it’s a different thing. Libertarianism involves rights and freedom of association, while these people want sort of a mafia world.
Libertarianism does not involve rights and freedoms. It involves pretend rights and freedoms, with a ruleset that guarantees they will be lost
It doesn’t involve anything other than rights and freedoms. There’s simply no space for you not being a bullshitting leftie jerk here.
From the perspective of a foreigner who has lived in the US, libertarianism is very much a scheme created by local oligarchs.
Americans think they are special and it’s only in other countries that people can fall for propaganda and schemes.
From the perspective of a Russian you don’t know what you are talking about.
I would argue that’s part of the (unfortunate) effectiveness of libertarianism as an oligarch polemic.
I’ve recently refreshed my mind on Khmer Rouge, and have gotten a very nasty feeling that, in a right (wrong) combination of circumstances, my ideological ideas could eventually lead to something like that. Despite being libertarian.
But one thing very notable about them - despite in ideology being frankly very fascist in addition to communist (fascist in a deep sense, the anti-intellectualism, the reliance on emotion, rejection of modernity and complexity, feeling of soil and violence, the almost deified organization, using 12-14 year olds as the main armed force, all that), many things, like their “struggle sessions” and the “quick and radical” solutions, were, one can say, reliant on wide participation and popular approval.
So. An oligarch is a businessman with power bending the law and allowing them to capture, together with other oligarchs, a sphere of the economy.
Oligarchy is not nice, and eventually always leads to authoritarianism (initially oligarchs install their tools at the top of the state, and then eventually those tools become the primary bearers of power and oligarchs their pockets, and then eventually oligarchs are robbed and the relatives and clansmen of the tools own everything).
However, it has nothing to do with libertarianism, because libertarianism is principally based on freedom of association (oligarchy usually involves suppressing unions and customer associations and cooperatives, and suppressing competition ; this also is about freedom of making a deal), non-aggression (understood as oligopoly being aggression in the means to enforce it, and the same about IP and patents) and natural law, the latter being rigid idea of ownership where what you create fully is yours fully, what you didn’t create is not yours at all, and the intermediate (real) things being all compromises between these. That notoriously makes owning territory dubious, which, ahem, is not very good for oligarchy.
That’s if there’s a working system of enforcing such a libertarian order, and if there’s none, then it’s not libertarianism.
And why did I mention Khmer Rouge - I don’t think blaming everything upon oligarchs and such is useful. Most of the people supporting any existing order are not bosses. If a society has oligarchy, then this means its wide masses are in general in favor of morality of oligarchy (who managed to capture a portion of an industry, deserves to milk it forever, and who managed to capture an institution regulating it, deserves the spoils, and so on), just like wide masses of Khmer peasants were more or less in agreement with that party’s ideas, until, of course, it became fully empowered.
It’s a failure of education, and I don’t think libertarianism is a component in that failure, after all, Kato institute is one of the organizations which haven’t ideologically drifted and just do what they are openly intended to do - provide the libertarian perspective on any events. Not drifting into lies in attempt to secure support is something I’d consider a good commendation. Maybe carriers of other ideologies should look at how that was achieved and build their own similar institutions. Then at some point problems might start being resolved by people knowing what they are doing.
