All posts tagged: Argument

The Left-Wing Argument Against New AI Regulations

The Left-Wing Argument Against New AI Regulations

Published by Sam Flores

Donald Trump has reacted to terrifying calls for regulation from inside the AI industry with predictable skepticism—insisting, questionably, that the solution requires nothing more than having a “High IQ” president, and further asserting, even more questionably, that he qualifies as one. A more surprising flank of opposition has arisen from a different source: the populist left, which has suggested that existing regulations would be perfectly adequate to rein in a rogue superintelligence bent on eliminating the human race. An article in The American Prospect by Whitney Curry Wimbish and David Dayen, headlined “Congressional Democrats in Hysterics About Saving the World From AI,” argues that the danger from runaway AI is overblown and that no new laws are needed to contain it. In response to former President Obama endorsing new regulation of AI, Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the populist Revolving Door Project, wrote on X, “This is wrong. These firms are outlaws.” Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission and a current adviser to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, argued …

The End of the Argument ad Orbánum

The End of the Argument ad Orbánum

Published by José Betancourt

A reasonable rule is that once you begin making an argument ad Hitlerum—comparing some malevolent politician to Hitler or some malignant movement to the Nazis, or declaring a brutal (but non-eliminationist) war a genocide comparable to the Holocaust—you have lost the plot. The facile but extreme analogy is the first resort of the unimaginative alarmist. To this we should now add the argument ad Orbánum, namely, the view that the Trump administration is just like that of the creeping, well-nigh unstoppable, and irreversible corrupt authoritarian ruler Viktor Orbán. In this view, the Hungarian prime minister’s version of illiberal democracy was coming for America, and would probably win—indeed, might have already won. In the wake of Orbán’s smashing electoral defeat on April 12, in a country whose experience of electoral democracy is recent and whose authoritarian past is dark indeed, the argument ad Orbánum looks pretty flimsy. Effective dictators do not usually lose elections, and when they do, they deny it and hold on to power anyway. Genuine fascists—not those merely cosplaying the role—send squads of …