Ezra Klein interviews Alex Bores on AI and Palantir

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From the article:

If you are living in New York’s 12th Congressional District, you may have seen these endless attacks on Alex Bores, one of the Democrats running there.

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Yikes. Bores did work for Palantir. The rest of that attack is not what you might call true, but what interests me is who is paying for it: the super PAC Leading the Future and its subsidiary Think Big.

Who funds the super PAC Leading the Future? Well, among their largest donors are the co-founders of OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz and — wait for it — Palantir.

So why is a co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, in this case, funding a super PAC to try to destroy a candidate on the grounds that he once worked for Palantir? The reason is that Leading the Future is a super PAC dedicated to destroying anyone who might regulate the tech industry, in general, or A.I., specifically, in a way these funders don’t like.

And Bores is a member of the New York State Assembly. He co-wrote and passed the RAISE Act, one of the first pieces of A.I. regulation passed in any major state.

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Bores, in general, has been a pretty effective legislator. In just over three years at the New York State Assembly, he has passed 30 bills and has been recognized by the Center for Effective Lawmaking as one of the most effective freshmen legislators.

But it’s his ideas on regulating A.I. that particularly interest me, in part because I think they make sense and are worth discussing — things like an A.I. dividend — but in part because I just really do not want to live in the world that Leading the Future is trying to create. A world where, if the A.I. industry hoovers in enough money, they can then destroy anyone who might try to regulate them.

What’s funny about all this is: Alex Bores is not an anti-A.I. kind of guy. I think he gets A.I. pretty well. I think he’s trying to balance its risks and its possibilities.

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How do you end up at Palantir?

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I was a young believer in — I probably wouldn’t put it in these terms back then — expanding government capacity and making sure government is actually delivering.

Palantir in 2014, in the Obama administration, was about how we could expand government capacity while protecting privacy and civil liberties. So at the time, it felt like very much the natural fit.

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Trump was elected in 2016. That was a weird bit.

With the aggressive support of Peter Thiel, one of the early investors in Palantir. Would you call Peter Thiel a Palantir co-founder?

I think so. I think that’s the phrase that is given.

But Alex Karp was very much fighting for Hillary at the time. And if you look at donations of employees at Palantir, they tell a very skewed story toward the Democrats, as well.

Lots more of interest.