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Yesterday, the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before a Senate judiciary subcommittee about the “significant harm” that ChatGPT and similar generative-AI tools could pose to the world. When I asked Damon Beres, The Atlantic’s technology editor, for his read on the hearing, he noted that Altman’s emphasis on the broader existential risks of AI might conveniently elide some of the more quotidian problems of this new technology. I called Damon today to talk about that, and to see what else has been on his mind as he follows this story.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

What makes the Durham report a sinister flop Has North Carolina found an abortion compromise? TV isn’t about to get worse. It already is. The billionaires who are threatening democracy

A Missed Opportunity

Isabel Fattal: Can you talk a bit more about Altman’s emphasis on the existential risks of AI, and what that focus might leave out?

Damon Beres: Discussing artificial intelligence in terms of vague existential risks actually allows Altman, and others discussing the future of artificial intelligence, to dodge some of the everyday impacts that we’re already seeing from the technology. For those who work in developing these tools, it’s a clever way of putting the ball in the court of lawmakers and essentially saying, This stuff is so big and abstract, and I’m fully on board with the idea that it should be regulated, and I want to be your partner in all this, but this is something that you have to wrestle with.

Isabel: What are some examples of these everyday impacts that get lost?

Damon: There was not really any talk at the hearing about the impacts of AI on labor. There were broad allusions to the idea of job loss. But there are so many specific ways that jobs are already threatened by automation today. Amazon is pushing for greater automation on its warehouse floors. The Writers Guild of America strike has brought the issue of AI-generated writing in entertainment to the forefront, but the strike didn’t come up in specific terms.

Additionally, we’ve seen AI deployed in a broad range of settings that deeply affect how people live their lives every day. Four years ago, there was a study on the algorithms that determined whether patients at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston should receive extra proactive medical care. And the way this artificial-intelligence system was set up ended up privileging relatively healthy white patients over sicker Black patients.That’s an example of artificial intelligence being deployed in a setting that is not necessarily getting meaningful governmental oversight but is fundamentally having a significant impact on human lives.

Of course, Sam Altman and OpenAI have their own corner of the world that they operate in. ChatGPT isn’t the same thing as a hospital program. But given the opportunity for lawmakers to think seriously about the impacts of artificial intelligence and what regulation could look like, it seems a little bit like a missed opportunity—we’ve known about these problems for a long time.

Isabel: Where do you think lawmakers should begin the conversation about AI regulation?

Damon: The EU is working on an AI act that would essentially regulate the development and deployment of new AI systems. And China has drafted policies that would enforce a certain set of rules over generative-AI products similar to ChatGPT, and also limit the kind of content these AI tools can create. So there are already a couple of precedents out there. There have also been a number of interesting proposals put forth here in the U.S. by AI experts who’ve been paying attention to this for quite a long time.

It’s encouraging that we’re having these conversations, but on the other hand, the horse has left the barn in a very real way. ChatGPT is already out there. We’re already facing the potential of job disruption. We’re already facing the potential for the internet to be flooded by spammy content and disinformation to a greater extent than maybe anyone would have thought possible even a couple of years ago.

And some of these large language models are already out of the hands of the technology companies themselves, let alone the government. For example, in March, an AI language model created by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, leaked. This was supposed to be a tool that would be available to AI researchers. It ended up pirated, essentially, and released on 4chan. Anyone who knows where to look can access and download this technology. It’s not ready-made like ChatGPT, but it can be developed and purposed in such a way. And once that’s out on the internet, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

There’s also still a need for oversight of the existing AI applications used in health care, law enforcement, surveillance, real estate—those sorts of things.

Isabel: With those existing applications of AI that have been around for years, it seems like the horse is really far from the barn at this point.

Damon: I think that’s right. We are interacting with what would be defined as artificial intelligence countless times throughout the day. You might wake up and talk to your Alexa device. You might see algorithmically sorted content when you look at your phone and read Facebook or even Apple News over breakfast. There are instances where you might be in the hospital and, unbeknownst to you, the type of care that you’re getting could be influenced by how your data are processed by an algorithm. AI is a gigantic category of technology that has been in development for decades upon decades at this point. Some of the most consequential impacts are those outside of tools like ChatGPT.

Related:

Before AI takes over, make plans to give everyone money. A chatbot is secretly doing my job.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy stated their intention to reach a deal on the federal government’s debt ceiling, which could occur as early as Sunday. The Supreme Court rejected a request to block state and local bans on assault-style weapons in Illinois. A UN agency says that the world will likely experience record temperatures in the next five years, and that it is poised to breach the crucial threshold of a 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature increase above preindustrial levels by 2027.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Nowhere in the U.S. should expect a cool summer, Matteo Wong writes—but even a less punishing season than recent summers would be hotter than historical norms.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Shelby Tauber / Reuters

Latinos Can Be White Supremacists

By Adam Serwer

A gunman turned a Dallas mall into an abattoir earlier this month, and parts of the American right reacted in disbelief. Not at the sixth mass shooting in a public place this year—by now these events have become numbingly routine—but that the suspect identified might have been motivated by white-supremacist ideology.

Why? Because the suspect was identified as one Mauricio Garcia.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The problem with counterfeit people Premature calls for Ukraine-Russia talks are dangerous. Photos: sepak takraw, a sport of airborne athleticism

Culture Break

Universal

Read. “A Week Later,” a poem by Sharon Olds in which she bids farewell to her husband of 32 years.

“And it came to me, / for moments at a time, moment after moment, / to be glad for him that he is with the one / he feels was meant for him.”

Watch. Fast X (in theaters this week), to understand why staff writer David Sims will only watch Fast XI, or whatever numeral it gets assigned, out of “grim professional obligation.”

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers overrode a veto by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper last night, enacting a ban on most abortions after 12 weeks of gestation. The ban will take effect in July.

The Old North State has frequently offered a preview of new currents in American conservatism over the past decade, hosting skirmishes about gerrymandering, restrictive voting laws, and spurious fraud claims before they became national issues. Now it could be setting a model for the nation on abortion battles too. Unlike in other, more solidly red states where GOP politicians have aimed for total or near-total bans on abortion, North Carolina Republican lawmakers opted for a law that would further restrict such procedures but allow most to continue. Under current law, abortions are legal up to 20 weeks.

Cooper and Democrats in the state fiercely opposed the law, and the override will make abortion central to the state’s elections in 2024, when North Carolina will see a heated contest over the governorship and is expected to be a presidential battleground. Those races will test whether voters in a closely divided state view the 12-week ban as a reasonable compromise, or revolt in the same manner as voters in states that have passed or attempted to pass more stringent laws.

[David A. Graham: The state election that could change abortion access in the South]

Yesterday’s vote overriding the veto was the culmination of a dizzying series of events. In November, Republicans gained seats in the General Assembly, nearly establishing a veto-proof majority but falling just short. Cooper and other Democrats placed his veto—especially his power to veto restrictions on abortion—at the center of the Democratic messaging during the election.

“I’m not personally on the ballot. My ability to stop bad legislation is. The effectiveness of the veto is on the line,” Cooper told me in October. If Republicans went on to win supermajorities in November, he warned, “there will be extreme legislation on abortion passed.”

After the votes were counted, Democrats managed to deny Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the state House by a single vote. But in April, State Representative Tricia Cotham, a Charlotte-area Democrat, shocked the state’s political class by switching to the Republican Party. The reasons for Cotham’s switch remain obscure. She’s the scion of a Democratic political family, and speculated reasons for her jump include personal pique and the lingering effects of long COVID. Whatever the reason, Cotham’s switch gave Republicans supermajorities in both houses and paved the way for abortion restrictions.

In January, Cotham joined other Democrats in sponsoring a bill to codify Roe v. Wade into state law. (In the GOP-controlled General Assembly, that bill was never anything more than a gesture.) Yet after her party switch, Cotham voted for the Republican abortion bill, which was designed in part to garner her vote as well as the support of other caucus moderates.

Cooper, other Democrats, and pro-abortion-rights groups rallied furiously against the bill. They hoped they might be able to pressure one or more of a handful of Republicans in swing districts to vote to sustain the veto, but when the Senate and then the House took up the override yesterday evening, Republican leaders kept their ranks together.

The new law makes North Carolina a pioneer for a compromise approach to the abortion issue—one that could defuse the issue, but could also fail to satisfy either side of the debate. As The Washington Post’s Caroline Kitchener and Rachel Roubein report, “It is the first new abortion ban to pass since the fall of Roe v. Wade that does not outlaw all or most abortions, effectively allowing roughly 90 percent of abortions to continue.” As states across the South have restricted abortion, North Carolina has become a magnet for women seeking abortions from all around the region, as Cooper emphasized to me in October.

[Read: The abortion absolutist]

Even with the new restrictions, North Carolina will be among the more permissive southern states. Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi all ban abortion in almost all circumstances. Florida recently passed a six-week ban, the same as Georgia’s. South Carolina’s law remains in flux after the state supreme court blocked a six-week ban, and a bipartisan bloc of female senators has resisted strict measures.

Republicans have sought to portray the 12-week law as a reasonable, “mainstream” compromise. The law includes exceptions for rape and incest up to 20 weeks, and for fetal life-limiting anomalies up to 24 weeks. But Democrats hope that even this bill will go too far for many voters ahead of the 2024 election. “North Carolinians now understand that Republicans are unified in their assault on women’s reproductive freedom and we are energized to fight back on this and other critical issues facing our state,” Cooper, who is not eligible for reelection in 2024, said in a statement last night.

The likely Republican candidate for governor, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, is a strident abortion opponent, and Democrats hope that the extremity of his position will help them hold the governor’s office. The state has consistently voted for Republican presidential candidates except in 2008, when Barack Obama won the state, but Democrats see the state as winnable in 2024, and will seek to make the campaign a referendum on abortion rights.

Whether voters endorse Republicans’ attempt at a more moderate path or punish them at the polls, the result is likely to offer an indicator of the post-Roe politics of abortion in other purple states around the nation.

By 2017, the billionaire financier Ray Dalio had grown his company, Bridgewater Associates, into the world’s biggest hedge fund. And like many wealthy executives, he had also begun to reinvent himself as a “thought leader,” weighing in frequently on topics such as geopolitics, public education, and workplace culture.

In the fall of that year, Dalio was interviewed by Michael Milken, a fellow billionaire who had previously been imprisoned for fraud. Onstage in Santa Monica, California, Dalio hailed Lee Kuan Yew, considered the founder of modern-day Singapore, as “probably the greatest leader of the last 50 or 100 years.” Lee’s three-decade rule transformed the country from what Dalio called “a mosquito-infested backwater” into a vibrant economy with a GDP per capita bigger than that of the United States. “The man was a very strong man,” Dalio said. Under Lee’s rule, “there was a firmness … there was a strictness in terms of the definition of what a good citizen was.”

To Lee’s critics, however, that’s not far off from authoritarianism. Today, Singapore is rated as only “partly free” by the human-rights organization Freedom House. Although the city-state has regular elections, the outcomes are largely predetermined: The ruling People’s Action Party has held power since Lee took office in 1959. (Lee’s son, Lee Hsien Loong, has been prime minister since 2004.) Political protest is rarely tolerated. “We decide what is right,” the elder Lee once said. “Never mind what the people think.”

At the same time, thanks in part to its deep integration with global financial markets, its huge flows of international capital, and the productivity of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with limited rights who are housed cheaply in dorms, Singapore is an economic powerhouse. For a small but powerful collection of executives, along with certain investors and libertarian ideologues, Singapore’s “benevolent dictatorship” offers a model for how well a market-driven system can work when concerns about democracy don’t get in the way. In his new book, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, Quinn Slobodian focuses on these figures—an informal grouping he calls “market radicals”—whose influence on the political right seems to be growing.

[Read: Cryptocurrency might be a path to authoritarianism]

Slobodian, a historian of ideas at Wellesley College, seeks to understand how these market radicals undermine democracy. His analysis zeroes in on a particular worldview that he claims is shared by an eclectic cast of characters, including former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. How this radicalism is expressed varies greatly: There are executives and investors who scour the globe for places to shelter and multiply their wealth, and who may not actively oppose democracy but do see civil and political freedom as secondary to economic permissiveness and societal stability. Some echo that most laissez-faire of economists, Milton Friedman, who once lamented that “political democracy has elements which tend to destroy economic freedom.” On the most extreme end, they include libertarian ideologues like Friedman’s grandson Patri, who advocates for “seasteading”—the creation of secessionist (and tax-free) communities that are built on floating platforms in international waters and, in turn, not beholden to meddlesome laws and regulations that don’t suit their founders.

As Crack-Up Capitalism shows, what unites market radicals is the conviction that societies should be designed to prioritize capital, not people. The book illustrates the profound fatalism about democracy—and sometimes outright contempt for it—that sits at the core of many market radicals’ beliefs. As Slobodian writes, they believe that democracy—self-government characterized by citizen participation, civil and political freedoms and protections, and representatives responsive and even beholden to the people’s demands—does not provide an adequate environment for maximal profit-making.

This opposition to democracy, however, doesn’t imply an opposition to government. As reflected in the desperate demands of venture capitalists and other wealthy investors for a bailout of Silicon Valley Bank, market radicals are enthusiastic about state power and resources—as long as that power prioritizes their ability to do business. “Their goal,” Slobodian writes, is “not to take a wrecking ball to the state but to hijack, disassemble, and rebuild it under their own private ownership.” Crack-Up Capitalism argues that market radicals aspire, above all, to use the authority of government to serve their interests: to eliminate taxes, unions, workers’ and citizens’ rights, political uncertainty, and barriers to capital flows, and to put the resources of the state—whether labor, land, or the legal system—at their disposal. They believe that this approach will, in turn, result in a more prosperous society with benefits eventually accruing to all.

In the lead-up to the United Kingdom’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union, many Brexit advocates believed that, once freed from EU regulations, Britain would become some sort of “Singapore-on-Thames.” But as Slobodian makes clear, this fantasy had it backwards. Singapore’s economic prosperity doesn’t stem from the absence of the state. Instead, the country’s growth depended in part on the government’s rigid social and political control of its people.

Singapore is just one of the world’s many legal jurisdictions where the government has used its authority to throw out traditional rules and laws—particularly those involving taxation. These pockets exist internationally but differ in size and scope and specifics. Some, including Singapore and Liechtenstein, are independent nations. Others are heavily promoted development projects, such as London’s Canary Wharf and New York City’s Hudson Yards. Still others are hardly visible to the unaware eye and might be as small as a few blocks. The 2017 Trump tax cuts, for instance, established “opportunity zones” that are intended to, according to the IRS, “spur economic growth and job creation in low-income communities while providing tax benefits to investors.” In these areas, the U.S. government subsidizes private investors by allowing them to avoid paying capital-gains taxes if they maintain their investments for at least a decade. (There are now more than 8,700 opportunity zones across the United States; Washington, D.C., alone has 25.)

Some of the zones most admired by market radicals can be found in Dubai. Like Singapore, the Persian Gulf emirate is remarkably welcoming of foreign money and responsive to the desires of corporations and investors. It is also willing to maintain different legal jurisdictions, allowing investors and companies to cherry-pick the configurations that best suit them—including those that weaken labor laws, protect investment assets from outside scrutiny, or even maintain a separate court system designed to cater to business interests.

Perhaps most important, however, Dubai is hyper-controlled—as an authoritarian monarchy, it is generally safe from any threat of political uncertainty or dissent. Its Jebel Ali Free Zone, an enormous port housing industries including retail, petrochemicals, and oil and gas that bills itself as “the world’s largest free trade zone,” attracts international investors in part by levying no personal-income or corporate taxes. But its appeal also stems from cheap labor and almost nonexistent workers’ rights, which means that migrant workers can simply be deported if they demand greater protections, raise concerns about their working conditions, or threaten to strike.

This combination of features has made Dubai and its neighboring emirates into hubs of investor capital and corporate interests. (Last month, for instance, Bloomberg reported that Ray Dalio would open an office in the Abu Dhabi Global Market, another low-tax zone in the UAE, to manage his family’s wealth.) But Dubai has also attracted another cohort of market radicals: libertarian ideologues who see its authoritarian model as an inspiration. Among Dubai’s vocal fans is the influential software engineer and blogger Curtis Yarvin, sometimes known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug, who has cited Dubai as evidence that “politics is not necessary to a free, stable, and productive modern society.”

[Read: The red states experimenting with authoritarianism]

While Yarvin may not be a household name for most Americans, he has grabbed the attention of some of the most powerful figures on the right, including Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Peter Thiel, one of the biggest Republican campaign donors in recent election cycles. In 2022, Thiel, who is friends with Yarvin and has written that he doesn’t “believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” invested tens of millions of dollars in the Senate campaigns of J. D. Vance and Blake Masters, both of whom, as Vox reported, have also praised and cited Yarvin’s work. Yarvin has even advocated on his blog for bringing some of the characteristics he admires about Dubai—namely, an authoritarian form of leadership—to the United States, which would ideally be run by a CEO “without any interference from the Congress or courts.” This worldview doesn’t exist on just the fringes of the internet. Slobodian suggests that it is beginning to infiltrate one of America’s main political parties.

Many of the market radicals Slobodian writes about say they are fighting to liberate humanity and unleash markets from the tyranny of government and bureaucracy. Thinkers and investors emanating from Silicon Valley, in particular, claim to be hacking the state to make it more efficient and effective. But Slobodian argues that many of these self-proclaimed advocates for disruption actually just want to disrupt the norms—such as civil and political freedom—that might threaten their interests. Democracy is already facing numerous threats from factions on the right who question the legitimacy of election results that don’t go their way. Crack-Up Capitalism is a reminder that this political challenge is only one of a number of fronts in the sustained attack on American democracy.

ChatGPT creator and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman urges lawmakers to regulate artificial intelligence during a hearing.

Members of the US Senate banking committee quizzed the bosses of the recently failed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank on May 16.

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