Zuckerberg publishes 6,500-word essay urging laissez-faire approach to AI
The Guardian’s editorial board this week criticized Silicon Valley’s use of its wealth in US politics, writing that the industry’s influence is “distorting debate in a political culture where the power of money already holds far too much sway.” The commentary, published as midterm elections loom in the US, said the spending is aimed at ensuring that voices sympathetic to the tech industry’s deregulatory AI agenda get elected.
The board described Silicon Valley’s use of its wealth to influence specific election races as “an unwelcome development.” It wrote that alongside open lobbying, “darker arts” are being used to counter popular concern about what AI will mean for a host of topics, from the labour market to child safety, the environment and cybersecurity.
The board wrote that Silicon Valley is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into super PACs — groups unaffiliated to political parties or campaigns — replicating a strategy deployed by cryptocurrency backers in the 2024 election cycle. It cited OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman and Palantir co-founder Jo Lonsdale as having given large sums to Leading the Future, an organization dedicated to “identifying, maintaining, and growing pro-AI candidates.”
The editorial opened with Mark Zuckerberg, who this week published 6,500 words making the case for a laissez-faire approach to AI development. The board said Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, argues that worrying too much about regulation could lead the United States to fall behind “in the race to own the future.” It wrote that much of his essay — which airily envisions “invention superpowers” for every entrepreneur and “an abundance of jobs in the future” — “reads like unadulterated tech-utopianism.”
The board called Zuckerberg’s “plea for maximum autonomy” self-serving. It said that in urging that AI’s democratizing potential be protected from those who believe “a small set of experts … should decide what is best for humanity,” Zuckerberg appears to miss the irony that “an unelected tech oligarchy, to which he belongs” is already performing that function by default.
Earlier this summer, the editorial said, Leading the Future spent $6 million on ads attacking Alex Bores, a New York state assemblyman and pioneer of AI regulation at state level. Rather than focus on his AI campaigning, the ads attacked Bores’s progressive credentials, alleging that he had carried out tech work in the past for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a claim the editorial said he denies. Bores, running for Congress in a Democratic stronghold, “lost a tight primary race after battling what was in essence a smear campaign,” the editorial said.
The board said countervailing forces are emerging. It cited the Guardrails Alliance, a union-backed super PAC that the board said is attempting to combat Leading the Future’s influence, and a “bipartisan groundswell of opposition” to data centers that the board said is generating serious electoral clout. A photograph accompanying the editorial showed demonstrators at a nationwide July protest against AI data center expansion in Imperial, California.
The board wrote that the industry’s pressure “has been instrumental in persuading Donald Trump to cancel the signing of an executive order” that would have given the government the right to review new AI models, and that the industry’s wealth “is now being used to attack and undermine dissenting voices in the public square.”
“If a democratic debate about the benefits and dangers of AI is to take place, such presumption must be fiercely resisted in the US and elsewhere,” the editorial said. “The semi-covert manipulation of political discussion is no way to map out an inclusive future in challenging times.”