As oligarchs go, tech moguls are much more visibly crazy. The resistance regulation has grown pathological in the last few years to the point of labeling people who would regulate AI literally the antichrist of the case of Peter Thiel. But it's really about mammoth. It's about money. It's about the scale of these companies' investment in AI. And I can't believe that AI will deliver on its promise as quickly as investors are counting on. Joining me on the Tech Report today is staff writer for The New Republic magazine and author of The Great Divergence, Timothy Noah. Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. So you wrote a piece for the New Republic that explains how the tech industry, which started in people's garages with the hopes of democratizing power, has declined into what we see it as today. Let's just start with what we are facing now. The AI boom or the AI bubble has seen so much private money and debt plowed into it at this point that you make the point it makes up 2% of America's GDP. Do you think that the AI industry can support the weight it's put on its own shoulders? And how big is the fallout should one of these companies collapse under the pressure? I think that the investment, you know, I think there is probably some sort of investment bubble that's occurring right now. And it's sustaining the stock market. And I can't believe that AI will deliver on its promise as quickly as investors are counting on. And of course, that's a familiar pattern that we've seen in the past with new technologies, the most recent being the tech bubble at the end of the 20th century. uh eventually we'll just have to see what ai uh is able to produce but it seems as if it's going to produce a lot i want to touch on some of the overlap between the tech industry and and the government which you go into in your piece but first do you think that the relationship between those two will lead to some sorts of bailouts or in your opinion if if they are bubble pops I don't know. That's a good question. To me, the area of greater concern is the reluctance of the government to regulate AI in any way. And the Trump administration has moved in the United States to prevent individual states from regulating AI. The concerns have grown so high now that finally the Trump administration, we've just learned, has set up a committee to discuss possible ways that the government would regulate AI. But I fully expect Trump to follow the lead of whatever the industry leaders tell him. So how do you think the fact that tech companies are becoming increasingly relied on for both military and civilian critical infrastructure will change that balance between tech governments and the rest of us? Well, it is an interesting trajectory because, you know, one thing that's been consistent throughout the development of the tech industry is that it was always very suspicious of government, even when it was, you know, relying on the government for things like ARPANET and then subsequently the Internet. It had a libertarian tinge to it. And it's always resisted regulation. But the resistance regulation has grown pathological in the last few years to the point of labeling people who would regulate AI literally the antichrist in the case of Peter Thiel. So and so the what has really happened is that the tech industry has become a kind of government in and of itself, both within the private realm where it controls so many aspects of one's life. And also in the sense that it has fused to a great extent with the federal government through defense contracting, especially. You mentioned the Peter Thiel and the Antichrist thing, which some people might be tangentially aware of. But just briefly, correct me if I'm wrong, it is this concept that getting in the way of technological advancement is morally wrong in some way. And it's a moral imperative to achieve AGI or something along those lines to save lives. In Thiel's case, it's quite literal. I mean, he believes that we will be enacting something very much like what occurs in Revelations, and there would be literally an Antichrist. He's suggested Greta Thunberg as the Antichrist. So Thiel is really pretty cracked on this subject. But what I argue in my New Republic piece is that as obviously nuts as Thiel's formulation is, a secular version of it has been embraced by the mainstream tech industry, which is that we absolutely must not interfere at all with the rise of AI Marc Andreessen has suggested that anybody who would suggest any limits at all would be akin to a murderer because lives could be lost in the absence of AI development. How much do you think that is informing US government policy at this point? Because as you said, they're not just not putting in place AI regulation. In some cases, they're instructing Republican states specifically to block them. It's driving government policy. Andreessen is the go-to guy for the Trump administration to call whenever they are considering this or that tech policy. So this guy who sounds like a nut himself when he says that you're a murderer if you want to regulate tech and reviles, you know, bland terms like sustainability. He's he is their guy. And so I don't expect the Trump administration to do anything to displease Mark Andreessen. Do you know how prevalent this kind of ideology is in the tech industry? Because obviously you've mentioned Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen. Do we know if this extends to other figures like, well, Sam Albert, Elon Musk, Dario M. Day, these other figures that we've got at the moment? I think the general idea is embraced as a policy. They are all resistant to any form of regulation. And it's, as I explain in my piece, it all sounds like it's driven by God. Peter Thiel would have you believe it's driven by God. But it's really about mammoth. It's about money. It's about the scale of these companies' investment in AI, which as a percentage of GDP exceeds what the United States spent to build the interstate highway system. It exceeds what the United States spent to put a man on the moon. it comes close to what the United States paid for the Louisiana purchase back in the early 19th century when it doubled the country's land size. It is a truly, truly gigantic investment on the part of these companies. And the extremity of the investment dictates the extremity of the rhetoric. And so by that logic, it's just a nice packaging, or maybe not nice, but a compelling packaging for traditional deregulation, but also a packaging that helps hype up the products that they're trying to sell us. I would call it not deregulation, but unregulation, since this is a new industry that wasn't regulated to begin with. But yes, absolutely, it's the standard government hands-off, but with a tinge of hysteria that we haven't seen before. You mentioned as well Silicon Valley was founded on this now sort of romanticized notion of people working in their garages, trying to bring power to the people through the world of tech and revolutionizing the world we live in for the betterment of everybody. how far departed are these companies from that original ideal and what would you say kind of was was the turning point at which they went from mum and pop companies that kind of were trying to help us all to ones which are like maybe we can extract as much profit just like every other corporation to trace the trajectory i think you need to go back to the 50s and 60s when the computer first appeared. And the initial view of the computer was extremely negative. It was physically gigantic. If you think of the old UNIVAC computers that occupied entire rooms in large corporations or government buildings, they were thought to be extremely threatening. Think of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001. Lewis Mumford, the cultural critic in the United States, wrote extensively about the threat that the computer posed to individual freedom. And that was really the image Americans had of the computer. And then in the 1970s, in the early 1970s, Stuart Brand writes a piece for Rolling Stone, where he's been watching these very hippie-like tinkerers in a lab at Stanford playing with computers and advancing the idea of the personal computer, which didn't come into being for another decade. And he said, no, no, we've got it all wrong. It It is not this mammoth thing that is going to swallow us all. It is going to be a tool for individual freedom. We will each of us have our own computer, which seemed very improbable in 1972 or three when he was writing. And it will bring information to the people. And that was the ethos that was celebrated in Silicon Valley for a long time. And you see it in the advertising strategy You see it in the rhetoric of people like Steve Jobs And to some extent it was obviously a con but to a great extent it was sincere There were countercultural aspects to these early days of computer technology And Brandt himself was a counterculture figure. He had been one of Tom Wolfe's merry pranksters, This group of people that Wolf wrote about in the electric Kool-Aid acid test who rode around the country in a bus with Ken Kesey dropping acid and expanding human consciousness. And Brandt said, these, you know, these tinkerers, they remind me of the Barry Pranksters. And Brandt himself ended up being a key figure in developing the Internet. He developed the well, which still exists as a forum for communication. So that was the early version. And you asked me about the turning point. I think the turning point came sometime in the last decade or so when you saw these companies increasingly moving towards monopolization and increasingly resisting efforts to control, particularly on social media, what was being communicated, reluctant to crack down on things like fraud or exploitation of children. And then Donald Trump was elected, re-elected president, and you saw practically a stampede of leading tech figures who previously had, primarily for lifestyle reasons, supported Democrats. instead moving rapidly towards Republicans simply because it was the party that opposed regulation. Do you think that in some ways the provocative marketing that tech companies have used, I'm thinking quite particularly at the moment with AI, they're coming after white-collar jobs, this kind of anxiety hype marketing they use, they're using is also partly what's turning the public sentiment against AI at the moment, or tech companies as a whole. Oh, absolutely. For one thing, these tech moguls, I mean, as oligarchs go, tech moguls are much more visibly crazy than, say, these leaders in finance and other industries. They don't really, they're not slick. Even Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is quite, is the very opposite of slick. He's a perpetual embarrassment saying crazy, frequently offensive things, often racially or otherwise, you know, anti-Semitic things. And so they are not sympathetic characters to begin with compared to someone like Steve Jobs, who, while clearly not a nice guy, was an idealist and attractive in that sense. This latest crop of tech leaders are, you know they have the affect of bond villains and that's not helping them politically. Following on from that there's a statistic that recently came out which found the majority of Americans Republican Democrat were opposed to data centers on a national scale not just on a local scale and part of me is wondering if the the the local impacts of data centers that are now becoming more and more infamous, sort of taking up local resources, pushing up energy costs, the humming, all these different things, has created also almost a more tangible expression of this imbalance that there is between where tech used to be for trying to help people and has now moved on to helping the government or helping themselves in a way that is as detriment to the people. Well, yes, I think the data centers have become a focus of outrage because they consume so much electricity that they drive up utility costs for ordinary Americans. And people respond very quickly to things like that, just as they're responding at the moment to the rise in energy costs due to the Iran war, which is unpopular for that reason. But I think it extends beyond that. I think it's a deep anxiety about the prospect of AI putting a lot of people out of work. And that's something that the public has been worrying about for a century. Later today, I'm going to be watching a live stream of an off-roadway production of a 1920s play called The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice, which was, I've always been curious to see it because it was a very early negative depiction of automation. And of course you think, the adding machine, you're worried about the adding machine? You have no idea how bad it's going to get So this is a longstanding worry And for a long time the nightmarish scenarios never came to pass These technologies created more jobs than they eliminated Then what you started to see with deindustrialization in the late 1970s was, yes, it was creating jobs, but it was eliminating particular kinds of jobs. It was eliminating working class jobs. And so you had the beginnings of a great deal of class conflict over the question of technology. And now, of course, AI is coming for the knowledge class jobs. And these same knowledge class people who half a century ago were telling blue collar people, well, you know, bad news for you, better retrain. are they are not going to be able to shrug it off when they themselves are the victims. And I think we're going to end up seeing some sort of legislation that will try to protect jobs. I don't know how effective it'll be. I did see is very much a statement from a random tech tech leader. But they were saying maybe we give robots minimum wage or make them paid minimum wage. so they humans can compete uh that's that's a story for another time um what about this feeling that if uh history is kind of repeating itself i don't necessarily mean the dot-com bubble that kind of stuff but we saw recently social media quite literally on trial this year and it was found that they had made their platforms addictive intentionally and and by design and now we're seeing somewhat similar thing happening where there's i mean i kind of want to specifically talk about the section 230 from what was it the the 1996 communications decency act which kind of was a watershed moment of removing liabilities for social media platforms or the internet then and soon to be social media platforms should i say killed my industry which is journalism i mean it was uh it was the death knell uh people blame craigslist but i don't think craigslist had much to do with it so i guess the question i'm trying to ask is do you think that we are at risk or we are already repeating history now where we are seeing ai companies lobby against being liable in the case of mass casualty events under 100 deaths or AI LLMs already providing actionable ways of instigating bioterror attacks and things like this but there's no liability there or certainly no no ruling that has put liability in one direction or another yet yes I think we're still we're once again we are seeing politicians being confronted by a technology they don't understand. They don't understand the dangers. They do recognize that it's capable of creating a great deal of wealth, and that's all they care about. In the case of Section 230, I don't think it's too late to repeal Section 230. I think it was an interesting experiment. What happens if we give every citizen the equivalent of a barrel of ink and they can say whatever they want and we hold the publisher? We don't hold the publisher liable. Interesting experiment, failed experiment. I think we need to make social media companies liable for just the same way the publisher of the New York Times is liable for anything that's said in the Times' newspaper. And the Times doesn't have anything like the reach of social media. So I think it's not too late to do that. it would harm social media companies. They would have to either change radically or be eliminated. But, you know, I remember life before social media. It went on fine, as I recall. And I don't think that we need to preserve this particular experiment into the future. Are you hopeful that that kind of thing will happen? Maybe not from just the US side, but looking to the EU, where they are playing around with some sort of international pursuit of safeguarding and that kind of thing? EU is the leader. Absolutely. The United States is not the leader in tech regulation. It's the EU. And that's for a number of reasons. One of which is that the presence of these companies and the EU is not as great. And therefore, it can be a little more objective about the effects of some of these technologies and demand greater concessions. It's also been tougher on the antitrust front than the United States has. So yes, I do expect to see and hope to see the EU continue that pursuit and ask these questions that the United States is very slow to even acknowledge. Well, Timothy Noah, thanks for taking the time. Thank you very much. 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