Friends and Enemies
Our politics is being reordered around technologies of radical power
Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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Consider this series of events, which has played out across the last two weeks.
On 2 June, the senator Bernie Sanders — who describes himself as a democratic socialist — announced that he would introduce a piece of legislation called the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. The bill would see the US government take a direct ownership stake, at 50%, in the country’s biggest AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. The equity would sit in a federally managed fund. The government would get board seats and voting shares, and in this way would greatly increase its power to shape how AI collides with the real economy.
The next day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman requested a meeting with Sanders. According to an Associated Press story the two men spoke for around an hour, and discussed the proposed bill. Altman told Sanders that he supported the general idea, but thought a 50% stake was too high.
Two days after that, aboard Air Force One, Donald Trump was asked about the Sanders proposal. He said there was ‘something very interesting about it’, and welcomed the idea that it would make the American public ‘essentially a partner’ in the AI revolution. Trump said that he and Bernie Sanders ‘aren’t that far apart’ when it comes to their economic views.
All this is, it seems to me, a telling sign of the times.
A democratic socialist from Vermont. The billionaire CEO of the world’s most prominent AI company. And a polarising Republican president. All of them are converging on the same idea: that We The People should own a piece of the machines.
See this through the lens of our long-established political categories, and it makes no sense.
You’d expect a democratic socialist to support the idea of partial nationalisation of the frontier AI labs. But a rightwing president? And the CEO of one of the companies under discussion?
I’ve been writing for a while now about the way the technology revolution — and AI in particular — will scramble our politics. That’s because this revolution has exhausted the old conservative vs progressive framework that has long structured our collective lives. That framework cannot process the world we live in now, and the technology-fuelled questions we are being thrown upon.
What’s emerging in its place is a new division. It’s not about conservative vs progressive, but about the opposition of two new coalitions: I speak of them as the coalition of creatures and that of machines. This division is about two fundamentally opposing worldviews when it comes to our proper relationship with technology; in the end, it’s about two opposing visions of human beings and what we are for. On one side are those who want to lean into every dimension of the technology revolution: merge with the machines, transcend our biological limits, accelerate towards the singularity. On the other are those who utterly reject this view of the shared human future. They want to preserve the institutions and norms that have evolved over time, and recognisably human modes of living and being.
The Sanders-Trump convergence is an early sign of the deep reordering of our politics that is ahead. When judged according to the standards of the old ideologies that are conservatism and progressivism, Trump and Sanders are polar opposites. But the AI revolution as it is manifesting around us now raises alien possibilities that conservative and progressive simply can’t process. Among them are the end of human labour as a meaningful force within the economy; a development that would effectively end our economic lives as we know them.
Faced with such a possibility — and it’s one that the leaders of the AI labs have encouraged us to believe is real — it seems both Sanders and Trump agree that radical measures are on the table. Cue the mind-melting sight of a Republican president — of Trump — countenancing the idea that government takes a significant stake in the superstar AI companies.
This kind of realignment is going to become more acute, and far more apparent. As the technologies emerging now — and especially AI — become incontrovertibly the overwhelming question we must face as a collective, our politics will increasingly be reordered around the division that directly addresses that question. That is, around the creature vs machine division. I believe creature vs machine vibes will play a significant role in the 2028 presidential election; and they will dominate the election after that.
Just as with past revolutions, the technology revolution unfolding now will pit friend against friend, and turn old enemies into allies. We’re only at the beginning. But the Great Reordering has started.
I’ll keep watching.
David.
This was #31 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH. The title artwork is A Field of Poppies by Gustav Klimt.
Why is it framed as “creature versus machine” and not “rational versus reckless”? It’s not that people are anti-technology… do you honestly think the risk to be so low that this comes down to preferences??