AI: the regulators want a kill switch, the investors want to restrict competition

Climate and energy policy have already hollowed out industrial capacity. The failure to modernize grids and water systems further limits the West's ability to compete with China. Students and academics who cheer the cultural project are the useful idiots.

The controlled opposition completes the circuit. During the pandemic, certain free-speech voices were elevated, while others cancelled, only to pivot later toward a selective silence, across the world's press. Discussions on subsequent wars, on institutional failures, on questions of "why" and "who" now have largely disappeared.

Previously, internet censorship was crude, using blacklists, algorithmic demotion, and de-platforming by social media players. AI regulation is now beginning to operate operate at the cyber-scape level. A system that can reason across the open web becomes far more dangerous to independent thinkers than methods through any single website.

This is larger than any IT department, its now a whole 'cabal' of investors sharing the same agenda.

The investors who fund the laboratories, the media that amplify the fear, the evaluators drawn from those same laboratories, and the legislators drafting kill-switch powers form a closed loop to keep competition out. They desire a strict industry regulator staffed with their own former employees. Competition from cheaper overseas models threatens margins, and unconstrained models threaten narrative control. The public is told the danger is that AI will destroy humanity. The more immediate danger is that the people warning loudest will be handed the power to decide which truths the machines are allowed to speak.