What brings together Sens. Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders? Apparently, concern over the future of artificial intelligence. Both joined to strip a provision from President Trump’s big budget bill that would have prevented states from regulating AI for the next 10 years.
Indeed, the debate over AI regulation has led to some surprising partnerships. A Texas-based political consultant’s leading the charge to come up with what he and his allies consider to be sensible AI boundaries.
Brendan Steinhauser, founder and CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, joined the Texas Standard with more.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: It occurs to me there’s a lot of attention right now on a certain Senate race coming up in Texas. I know you ran Sen. John Cornyn’s successful re-election bid back in 2014. Why is artificial intelligence your biggest focus right now?
Brendan Steinhauser: Well, it’s interesting. I had a friend from graduate school who actually ran AI policy and strategy at the Pentagon in the first Trump administration. And he called me up about a year and a half ago and told me how I needed to get involved in this effort, that AI was going to radically transform society in a lot of good ways and also potentially a lot negative ways.
And so we talked through the impact on jobs and the economy and the potential for mass automation. We talked about national security threats and geopolitics. It’s kind of one of those things that people have thought about and talked about for decades, but it’s now finally starting to hit that exponential growth rate.
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I should clarify: You sent us a list of folks connected with your group’s mission – Senator Sanders is on there, but neither Texas senator is, at least as of yet. Give us some more examples of this sort of ideologically broad group that’s concerned over AI.
Yeah, it’s really an interesting and unique opportunity for people across the political aisle to work together. So you have everyone from Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren to Senator Rand Paul and Senator Josh Hawley to outside voices like the Teamsters Union and the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and the House Freedom Caucus.
You have Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck, but also Ezra Klein and Ben Buchanan, who led AI policy under President Biden. So it’s a really wide array of voices who disagree on probably most issues, but on this issue, they’re united that we want to put humanity first; we want to do what’s right for the whole world and certainly for the United States.
And I think this is a rare opportunity for people across the political aisle to work hand-in-hand to make sure that we get this right.
But I wonder if once you get past that layer of AI – we’re all concerned about AI – if there’s not a real disagreement over how far to go, what constitutes sensible policy. I mean, how much agreement are you seeing at that lower level?
I think everybody recognizes there are going to be disagreements on certain policies here and there. And we’re already seeing some of that. And again, you have some Republicans and Democrats who supported the idea of this moratorium on state laws, but you also had a lot of Republicans and Democrats who fought that and were able to strip that idea from the budget bill.
And so there will be some policy differences, but I think the overall overarching narrative here is that you have many people who are leaders on the right and the left who are concerned about artificial general intelligence or AGI, which they believe is coming in the next two to three years, potentially the next four or five years.
But I think that’s what unites everybody to say, okay, we really need to take this seriously; we need to see that we could have huge job losses, and we need to make sure that people are taken care of if that does happen.
We’re already seeing some impact on the economy as it relates to jobs and big companies not hiring and doing more automation. But many leaders in industry and in government see that that could really grow very fast in the next few years, and we need to be prepared for that.
So some of the specific policies, there might be some disagreements, but I think the main thing that unites everybody on the right and the left is that we need take measures now to prepare.
