WASHINGTON —
The same week Bernie Sanders and the DSA caucus demanded a lock on American AI, António Guterres walked to a microphone in New York and offered the United Nations as landlord. “National action is essential,” he said. “But global coordination is also indispensable.” Translation: keep your flag, hand over the code.
Guterres warned of a “race to the bottom on AI safety,” listed runaway AI next to climate and inequality as an “existential threat,” and floated a soon-not-now international summit with “everybody on board” — governments, companies, scientists, NGOs. The Security Council may take it up during UNGA week. He wants guardrails, a shared understanding, and mechanisms among the countries that actually build the models so the rest of the chamber can vote on the rest of the future. Voluntary pauses, he said, will not do. Good intentions will not do. The bureaucracy will do.
This is the Facebook play with a blue helmet. First they panic. Then they staff the panic. Then they call the staff “governance.” The last network was captured by White House pressure and $350 million in “election infrastructure.” This one they want written in Turtle Bay, where China sits at the table, the General Assembly is 193 votes, and no American worker ever elected a single one of them.
President Trump called the extinction scare a hoax and the slowdown a sick conspiracy. He is right about the motive even if the machines are real. The motive is primacy. Who writes the standard writes the market. Who writes the standard writes what an American model is allowed to say about the grant, the PAC, the border, and the last election. They say it will be fine if control is handed to them.
We say screw off. A republic does not subcontract its mind to a body that cannot keep peace, cannot keep books, and cannot keep its own delegates from treating U.S. industry as a commons. Guardrails at home. Coordination with allies. No UN veto on American compute.
— Josiah Hale, WAA1776
References
