If you’ve even so much as glanced at the news recently, you may have picked up on the raging debate over AI regulation in the US. Stronger regulations are incredibly popular with Americans from across the political spectrum — but not so much with their head of state, Donald Trump.
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City today, Trump blasted those calling for any kind of pause or slowdown to AI development. His rationale is stunning: near-total deregulation is working out great for the environment, he suggested, so why not replicate that success in the realm of AI?
“The United States… totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now,” Trump rambled to the various heads of state and their delegations. “Yet the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming — a name since reborn to ‘climate change,’ because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead — these are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, that everything is going to be a total disaster.”
Trump also took the opportunity to introduce his new rebrand of the tech, from artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.”
“Herein after, officially called, ‘super intelligence’ — changing the name — and that the use of the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake. It’s actually not fake, it’s actually amazing — but we have to be careful,” Trump maundered, seemingly in contradiction of his statement that there’s nothing to be worried about. “In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence.”
FULL SPEECH: Trump addresses United Nations General Assembly
There are a few things worth breaking down here. First and most obviously, climate change is actively killing people across the world, via extreme heat waves, glacial melt-off resulting in freak mudslides, and prolonged droughts resulting in devastating wild fires, to name just a few examples from this past summer.
It’s probably no wonder the president doesn’t acknowledge these events: he’d have to see them first. As Trump is an incredibly rich guy in the wealthiest country on the planet, he’s unlikely to ever interact with the victims of our rapidly warming world, who rank among the poorest and most destitute around the globe.
Trump’s comments also reveal his socioeconomic outlook in another way. The climate movement, which he insists has moved on to the next issue-of-the-week, AI, is still alive and well in grassroots organizations, international coalitions, and academic circles. What’s changed is the attitude of American corporations and billionaires, who have made a hard pivot away from green capitalism in order to embrace Trump’s “drill baby, drill” energy regime.
In hand-waving concerns about climate change and AI as hysterical sloganeering, Trump is signaling to the UN his intention to ignore both issues — a declaration that puts the rest of the world on the hook for his country’s many, many messes.
More on AI: AI’s Impact on the Environment Is Absolutely Horrifying, New Paper Finds
