Is it me or does this seem like naked corruption at its worst? These tech CEOs hang out at the White House and donate to superfluous causes and suddenly the executive is protecting their interests. This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.
> This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.
Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
We regulate medicine, nuclear technology, television, movies, monopolies, energy, financial services, etc. because these things can be harmful if left solely to the market. Americans value honest work, dignity, prosperity and equal opportunity. Innovation is useful in so far as it enables our values - regulation is not counter to Americans interests, it protects them.
Rubyfan mentioned nuclear technology, which like cryptography, has a broad scope and military applications so isn’t something that was just left to the market to decide the best fit.
I don’t think I’ve left the scope of this discussion.
I was more talking about the consumer radiation side. Radium water to drink, women licking and painting radium watch dials. Toy physics kits for kids with uranium in it. Uranium glass also isn't great.
I mean the radium fad just by itself was pretty crazy, people used radium suppositories and radium makeup.
It’s a lot harder to put the genie back in the bottle once out.
AI is already hurting people. We need regulation to hold it and its benefactors accountable. The federal government is preempting states from doing so.
I don't think you realize the level of damage it generally takes to get bipartisan support for creation of an oversight body.
It was popularized that an estimated 8,000 infant deaths attributed to swill milk occured every year in NYC in the 1850s (take with a grain of salt).
Even more recently much of the banking regulation only occured after severe market issues that broadly impacted the economy.
On a related note: "Layoffs" are going to be a hard practical harm point to rally around. Unless we fundamentally change the nature of our economy (Which doesn't tend to happen until the previous system collapses.), effeciency is king. Tha market isn't rational, but effeciency is a competitive advantage that compounds over time. So you have a prisoners dilemma here. If you want to restrict a technology that boosts efficiency, you either have to close your market and then put up rules that constrain efficiency or you bleed your prosperity.
Sure. And this is not that. This says: before we begin to think about our policy let's make sure to remove any barriers for Mr. Altman and friends so that they don't get sucked down with their Oracle branded boat anchor.
If this had any whiff of actually shedding light on these needed regulations the root OP wouldn't have said what they did. But for now I'm going to head over to Polymarket and see if there are any bets I can place on Trump's kids being appointed to the OpenAI board.
Not true that US is 100% gas pedal constantly on innovation. You’re forgetting labor reform movements and the service switch away from industry in the last few decades. Also the de-science-ing of the current admin has vastly reduced our innovative capacity, as well as the virtual decapitation of brain drain. Those next generation of brightest immigrants certainly aren’t coming here to deal with ICE, and that’s been the source of half the great minds in our country throughout its history, gone because of racism.
I kind of doubt American scientists will leave en masse to go elsewhere. Their options are only Europe, the UK, or China. Most will not be willing to give up the salaries or the resources available to scientists in the USA, even with the current administration, to go live in strongly hierarchical academic systems that they don’t know how to navigate. Especially not for a 30% salary reduction (or more if they go someplace like France or Italy).
Reread what the previous poster said. They were talking about folks coming to the US. Around 50% of doctorate level scientists and graduate students in STEM come from outside the US.
Canada? Australia? 30% (or more) salary cut certainly applies but academic systems are similar and resources are in the same ballpark at top research universities.
They don't have to go anywhere if they just don't come here. American science works on the back of underpaid foreign born graduate students. If they aren't there, neither is American science. It's already started. And that's not even considering the other 'reforms' currently deliberately crushing academia. The first thing a new fascist regime needs to crush is the immigrants, and the second is academia. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/graduate-studen...
The case against this EO is not “banning new technology”. It’s not allowing the federal government to ban any state regulation. And states having the power to make their own rules is maybe the most American value.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption
Until that "innovation and disruption" threatens any established player, at which point they run crying to the government to grease some palms. China is innovating and disrupting the entire energy sector via renewables and battery storage while the US is cowering in the corner trying to flaccidly resuscitate the corpse of the coal industry.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
Where did you get the idea that this was the cause that created millions of jobs and lead to the US running the world's largest economy, and not say - the knock-on effects of the US joining WW2 relatively late and unscathed, making it the only major world power left with a functioning enough industrial complex to export to war-ravaged Europe?
I see your point, but that is definitely not the only cause of American economic dominance. The U.S. has been the largest economy by GDP since ca 1900 – i.e. before the wars.
The patent system. I know someone will respond detailing why the patent system is pro-business, but it is objectively government regulation that puts restrictions on new technology, so it's proof that regulation of that sort is at least an American tradition if not fully an "American value".
Patents and trademarks are the only ways to create legal monopolies. They are/were intended to reward innovation but despite good intentions are abused.
Not exactly. For example, Major League Baseball has been granted an anti-trust exemption by the US Supreme Court, because they said it was not a business. In some cases in which firms have been found guilty of violating the anti-trust laws, they were fined amounts minuscule in relation to the profits they gained by operating the monopoly. Various governments in the US outsource public services to private monopolies, and the results have sometimes amounted to a serious restraint of trade. The chicanery goes back a long way. For the first decade or so after the passage of the Sherman Act, it was not used against the corporate monopolies that it was written to limit; it was invoked only against labor unions trying to find a way to get a better deal out of the firms operating company stores and company towns etc, etc.
Then Teddy Roosevelt, the so-called trust-buster, invoked it under the assumption that he could tell the difference between good and bad monopolies and that he had the power to leave the good monopolies alone. 120 years later, we are in the same sorry situation.
Intellectual property restrictions cause harm even when used as intended. They are an extreme rest restriction on market activity and I believe they cause more harm than good.
Patents, trademarks, copyright, deeds and other similar concepts are part of what makes capitalism what it is, without them capitalism will not work because they are the mechanisms that enforce private property.
Good luck with that. When 3/4 of the world laughs at your patent what is the point of patents? IP only works when everyone agrees to it. When they don't it's just a handicap on the ones who do that benefits nobody.
Maybe it should be. The system here in the US has produced some great innovations at the cost of great misery among the non-wealthy. At a time when technology promises an easier life, it only seems to benefit the wealthy, while trying to discard everyone else. The light at the end of the tunnel is a 1%-er about to laughingly crush you beneath their wheels.
I don't think this is the strongest argument. Every technological revolution so far has initially benefited the wealthy and taken a generation or two for its effects to lift the masses out of previous levels of poverty, but ultimately each one has.
To me the stronger argument about AI is that this revolution won't. And that's because this one is not really about productivity or even about capital investment in things that people nominally would want (faster transport, cheaper cotton, home computers). This one is about ending revolution once and for all; it's not about increeasing the wealth of the wealthy, it's about being the first to arrive at AGI and thus cementing that wealth disparity for all perpetuity. It's the endgame.
I don't know if that's true, but that's to me the argument as to why this one is exceptional and why the capitalist argument for American prosperity is inapplicable in this case.
I don't know about for all perpetuity. If history has shown, anyone that reaches the pinnacle eventually becomes complacent, technology improves by becoming faster/cheaper/smaller. That just means it is prime to always be susceptible to a new something coming along that stands on the shoulders of what came before without having to pay for it. They start where the current leader fought to achieve.
I don’t know about that. The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America. While American capitalism has many faults, oppressing the bottom quintile is not one of them. The US median income is consistently top ten globally.
Median income doesn't tell much if you don't factor in the cost of living. My salary sucks compared to what I would earn in America, but when I factor in things like free healthcare, daycare and higher level education, I'm better off here.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption
Arguably true, but it's also been way ahead of the pack (people tend to forget this) on protection for organized labor, social safety net entitlements, and regulation of harmful industrial safety and environmental externalities.
> Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Copyright law is another counter-example to your argument. But somehow? that’s no longer a concern if you have enough money. I guess the trick is to steal from literally everyone so that no one entity can claim any measurable portion of the output as damages.
I’ve always thought Copyright should be way shorter than it is, but it’s suspect that we’re having a coming to Jesus moment about IP with all the AI grifting going on.
Copyright has nothing to do with banning technology. It is a set of rules around a particular kind of property rights.
There are things you can do with technology that are banned as a result of copyright protections, but the underlying technologies are not banned, only the particular use of them is.
The question isn’t the jobs created but how have workers benefited from increased productivity? They haven’t materially since late 1970s. That’s when the American labor movement began its decline. Innovation isn’t what helps workers. The gains from innovation have to be wrenched from the hands of the ruling class through organized resistance.
I think your take is historically accurate. Although one does wonder how long we'll be able to get away with keeping the pedal to the metal. It might be worth taking a moment to install a steering wheel. Rumor has it there are hazards about.
This is a tribute system, way past lobbying. Lobbying is cheap, Senators can be bought off for 5-figure sums. CEOs pay lobbyists so they don't have to meet with them personally. What's happening now involves CEOs appearing at political events and lobbying the president personally, to the tune of millions of dollars in declared "donations" for "ballroom construction", in exchange for security guarantees for their business empires.
Lobbying is tightly regulated, and the FEC really does keep a close eye.
This is just flat out bribery, using the thinnest of legal fig leaves. Which would not possibly pass muster if he hadn't also packed the court with supporters.
Is it you? I mean, the guy started his term by launching a scam coin along with his wife. He hates the United States and sees it as just something to exploit for financial gain and power. That's it. That's literally all there is to all of his actions.
The US was founded on crime. We are a colonial imperial country with a penchant for using racism and religion in order to maintain a certain lifestyle for white supremacists.
Slavery was really not that long ago, we are still actively invading countries and murdering people for oil, and we help bankroll straight up genocide in regions such as Darfur and Palestine.
People had nearly a decade of experience with Donald Trump as a known political entity and decades of receipts and lawsuits prior to 2016 to speak to his amoral and corrupt nature. If they didn't know exactly what they were buying into they were idiots. He isn't exactly a master manipulator.
Also, The first time Trump was elected, the majority of voters went for Hillary Clinton. Second time, it was still 49% versus 48% for Kamala Harris. The majority of Americans have never voted for Donald Trump nor ever supported him.
You asked, "Whats wrong if US population has voted for this?" in response to someone complaining that the system is not working, and so I explained it: the rest of us are not represented. I'm unsure what point you're getting at.
My point is: presidents are not delivered to your country by president delivery alien space ship. A lot of people voted for him and this is a fact. You cant just blame everyone of them for being dumb or racist. If you dont like their choice that means you should starting to do something about it.
Authorithorianism also not just happen - it take years to build and destroy institutions. It took 20 years to build fascist regime in my country.
It is definitely naked corruption. Lobbying was always around, but I would say that with this administration things are a lot more transactional and a lot more in the open. Companies like Palantir and Anduril and others are being gifted contracts all over the place - that’s money we taxpayers are losing.
It's hard to say what they're actually qualified to do but they went from receiving 1 or 2 contracts per year in the early 2020s for a few 10s of millions and I think one larger $200M one to this since Trump was reelected;
The Marine Corps I-CsUAS award is explicitly described as an IDIQ with a maximum dollar value of $642M over 10 years -- though it could be much less -- and reporting indicates it was competitively procured with 10 offerors. It wasn't "gifted"/"no-bid"
Also: $642M spread over 10 years is roughly $64M/year at the ceiling, and ceilings are often not fully used. That scale is not remotely unusual for a program-of-record counter-UAS capability if the government believes the threat is persistent. (Which it does.)
The rest are similarly mundane and justifiable.
Here's what would be weird: Repeated sole-source awards where a competitive approach is feasible, implausible technical scope relative to deliverables, unjustified pricing, or political intervention affecting downselects. I don't see any of that here. (But, okay, let's not talk about Palantir, lol.)
> protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes
So where is this coalition that’s organized to actually make this real?
Software engineers are allergic to unionization (despite the recent id win) and 100% of capital owners (this is NOT business owner and operators I’m talking about LPs and Fund Managers) are in support of labor automation as a priority, the same people also run every government and overwhelmingly select the politicians available to vote for, so who will fund and lead your advocacy?
Game developers are subject to much more abuse than the average software engineering job, for less pay. It's a different environment.
I'm open to the idea of guilds, but personally I do not want others negotiating for me with the type of work I do, I'd prefer it to be a contract between me, my employer and nothing else. Unions aren't always a net benefit for every industry.
Of course, with AI going the way it is, collective bargaining might become more attractive in our field. But institutions can be slow to catch up and not everyone always agrees with the outcome. Personally, if I worked in Hollywood, I'd be upset about the kind of anti-AI scaremongering and regulation taking place in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.
Median income and the purchasing power of disposable income are substantially higher in the U.S.
The public sector unions do represent a much larger share of the population than the CEOs but in absolute terms public sector workers constitute a very small share of the population, while receiving a large share of public spending. Given they are being rewarded with huge amounts of tax dollars from the party they help keep/put in power, the concern that there's a systemic pay-to-play dynamic at work is very justified.
> but in absolute terms public sector workers constitute a very small share of the population, while receiving a large share of public spending
Uh... Just no? Public spending? That's défense, health care, entitlements etcetera etcetera
I'll actually back it up with some numbers too:
> That’s 1% of gross domestic product, and almost 5% of total federal spending. The government payroll for other developed countries is typically 5% of GDP, Kettl said.
> Median income and the purchasing power of disposable income are substantially higher in the U.S.
Not sure what you're basing that on but there's this too
> The statistic is used to show how unequal things have become in the U.S.: Some 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with even $400 to pay for an unexpected bill
Disposable income is essentially just income after tax. It’s the amount you have where you get to direct where it goes / how you dispose of it. It’s not money after essentials.
There are many ways to slice it but the US median income is high.
Your $400 stat is about liquidity and balance-sheet fragility; it doesn't tell you the cross-country level of median PPP-adjusted disposable income. OECD Figure 4.1 is the relevant comparison.
Generally, countries with more government social spending have lower savings rates, because people irresponsibly rely on the taxpayer as their backstop, so I'm not surprised at all. The U.S. actually has very high levels of social spending, despite the stereotype of it being a very free-market-oriented economy. That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.
Since you took the data for federal and state and local, you end up with 22.51 million employees[1].
Out of a total number of employed people of ~160M that's 1 in 8 employees. If you're calling 1 in 8 'a small share' the we just disagree there.
As to the $400 statistic, let me just point out that this
> That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.
Is very much an opinion, not a fact.
Maybe there's also that for the low income earners there isn't any money left after paying for housing, food and such. And I'm not even talking about health insurance.
> we need a hyper-productive world where someone working a few hours a year generates enough wealth to secure a comfortable lifestyle up there with the best of them.
This is naive, productivity increases had decoupled from compensation a long time ago. See https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ for example. AI certainly can create wealth, and in fact already did (hey NVDA), but somehow that did not trickle down. I think more likely than not, AI will further stratify our society.
Why then, outside of Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the UAE (All of which are tiny countries, and at least two of them are Petrostates), does the United States have the world's highest median income with a population of over 342 million people?
The typical American is insanely wealthy by global standards.
Who cares? If higher wealth inequality produces a higher standard of living for the majority (note, median not mean), I’m all for it. Policy should not be driven by envy.
You should care because people vote and the social consequences are going to be devastating.
It is easy for me to take this perspective too because I never had much student debt or children.
The median though is getting crushed if they went to college and are paying for daycare.
If you are getting crushed for going to school and having children that is a pretty clear breakdown of the social contract.
The consequences are obvious. People are going to vote in socialist policies and the whole engine is going to get thrown in reverse.
The "let them eat cake" strategy is never the smart strategy.
It is not obvious at all our system is even compatible with the internet. If the starting conditions are 1999, it would seem like the system is imploding. It is easy to pretend like everything is working out economically when we borrowed 30 trillion dollars during that time from the future.
> The median though is getting crushed if they went to college and are paying for daycare.
> If you are getting crushed for going to school and having children that is a pretty clear breakdown of the social contract.
That isn't a factor in wealth inequality. Inequality is how much money they have relative to people like Musk and Bezos - or just local business owners. The poor side of that comparison always has such little wealth/income that their circumstances don't really matter. Someone poor will be sitting in the +-$100k band and not be particularly creditworthy. When compared to a millionaire the gap is still going to be about a million dollars whether they're on the crushed or non-crushed side of the band.
Part of the reason the economic situation gets so bad is because people keep trying to shift the conversation to inequality instead of talking about what actually matters - living standards and opportunities. And convincing people to value accumulating capital, we're been playing this game for centuries, inter-generational savings could have had a real impact if people focused on being effective about it.
The 1870-1900 period experienced the greatest expansion of U.S. industry, and the fastest rise in both U.S. wages and U.S. life expectancy, in history.
Right we had a functioning labor movement to thank for productivity gains being distributed to the working class. When that got undermined beginning late seventies early 80s with offshoring we see wealth just flowing to the top without significantly benefiting the working class.
Insanely wealthy when your comparison includes tin pot dictatorships, theocracies, and ex-soviet countries that still haven't gotten their shit together. Weird how that unimaginable wealth doesn't translate into financial security, access to high quality healthcare, or the ability to own a home.
I don't know why you think that graph is contradicting me, if wages and productivity aren't linked having people do make-work is even more stupid! They're already doing work that they aren't even being compensated for, fighting to preserve that when the work doesn't need to be done is legitimately crazy. It'd be fighting for the right to do work that isn't being compensated for and isn't useful. One of the rare situations that is even worse than just straight paying people to not do anything. I'm seeing a scenario where we have such high individual productivity that everyone can live a very comfortable life. If in practice the way it is working is a couple of people do all the work and the benefits are divvied up among everyone else then that hardly undermines the vision.
Although if we're talking the optimum way of organising society, y'know, re-linking wages and productivity is a probably a good path. This scheme of not rewarding productive people has seen the US make a transition from growth hub of the world to being out-competed by nominal Communists. They aren't exactly distinguishing themselves with that strategy.
But humans aren't more productive for the most part. What had made people more productive is, for the most part, mechanization, computerization, and other tech tree improvements.
Even though everyone didn't get rich from the industrial revolution, ultimately people led easier lives, more stuff, and less work.
Peasants in the Middle Ages did hard, agrarian labor, had poor sanitation, high child mortality, and limited horizons. While nobles had wealth and comfort, the era was generally harsh, with most lacking modern amenities and facing short, physically demanding lives.
I’m not an expert but my understanding is a slow migration from agriculture oriented jobs to industrial to information jobs. Yes we all have more cheap junk but also economic disparity and a hollowing out of the middle class. That will get worse faster than new types of jobs can be created. Will the new jobs even replace the same levels of income? It seems impossible.
Question number one. Is dominance really a necessary part of a country's existence? Can't you just have peaceful relations and supportive relationships with other countries to live in harmony, when artificial intelligence brings benefits to all countries, not just the USA? Can't you build on the technological foundations that have been laid to create sustainable development for your society?
The desire for more. To have more than others, is a key problem that generates unhealthy politics. Unhealthy foreign policy towards other countries. In your pursuit of being first in everything. Being first in everything, preventing the development of other countries, holding onto technologies for yourself. You create an imbalance. You create an imbalance in the global economy, in politics, in the social sphere, and in the social environment.
Isn't there an alternative to having sustainable development? Built on the principles of mutual support and focused not on dominance, but on collaboration between peaceful states. Between peaceful states.
Not necessarily — it's about respect. And a time-tested method is to exert your dominance (typically with violence). Maintaining power[1] is about maintaining respect [2].
[I love that certain groups of sub-ordinate apes have been observed literally tearing the alpha monkey apart, killing him; effectively ending excessive tyrannies]
As a counter-example, among the most respected persons in a prison system is the one who is generous[0] with their commisary. Snickers bars end wars.
"You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar"
>~The desire for more.
"The problem with always winning is you end up having to win all the time." —John Candy
[0] without reciprical expectations
[1] "everything is about sex, except sex; sex is about POWER" — without further commentary, other than are you reading these headlines (PS: he didn't kill himself)?!
[2] If you have not, Tim Urban's book What's Our Problem[3] is among my favorite datageek sociology books. It helped me better understand both my world and my lawyer brothers. He's the author of the excellent Wait But Why? blog.
Yes, dominance is preferred.
Countries’ resources aren’t evenly distributed, and this fact determines foreign policy more than anything else.
There’s no world govt or global authority. Every country must look after its own interests.
Having every country cooperate requires trusting some entity as a global enforcer, one that wont abuse their unchecked power. Obviously, america has played this role since ww2 but not without plenty of mistakes and oversights.
We as humans haven’t found an alternative to this yet.
Stasis is the quickest way to be 'sustainible' but is a far from ideal outcome. Even if we ignore the squandered potential, take a look at what happened to Japan and others who pursued policies of stagnation for the sake of stability. The lucky ones only got admiral Perry-ied. The unlucky ones were brutally colonized or conquered. The really unlucky ones no longer exist.
States are what can be called superorganisms literally made entirely out of coercion to get others to serve their goals without their consent. Despite the claims of social contract, nobody ever signed one. Asking statew not to seek dominance is like asking a wolf to take up vegetarianism. They technically could do it but it goes fundamentally against its entire design and purpose.
Not to mention that saying no to 'more' isn't kumbaya everyone has peace and freedom. It means active suppression of ambitions of others. States are made of coercion, remember?
I imagine it’s a nod to the way the stated goal would normally be pursued, but in this case is not.
It sounds like a good idea to establish a uniform national policy! And the federal government can do that (although only for the very specific purposes spelled out in the Constitution). The right way to do that is to pass a law through both houses of Congress, and the president to sign it into law. Maybe the law even specifies a broad framework and authorizes the executive branch to dial in the specific details (although the court seems to be souring on that kind of thing too).
The god-king proclaiming a brand new framework governing a major new sector of the economy To Be So is.. not the normal way
That's the whole point. They aren't law, and they were (probably) never meant to be so far-reaching, and yet the clear purpose of this Executive Order is to tell the states what laws they can enact. The EO doesn't have the legal power to do that directly, but it clearly outlines the intention to withdraw federal funding from states that refuse to toe the line.
> The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to create an “AI Litigation Task Force” within 30 days whose "sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws" that clash with the Trump administration's vision for light-touch regulation.
The EO isn't about Federal Preemption. Trump's not creating a law to preempt states. So a question about how Federal Preemption is relevant is on point.
> My Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard — not 50 discordant State ones. …
Sounds like leaving it up to Congress! But then the administration vows to thwart state laws despite the vacuum of no extant preemption, so effectively imposing a type of supposed Executive preemption:
> Until such a national standard exists, however, it is imperative that my Administration takes action to check the most onerous and excessive laws emerging from the States that threaten to stymie innovation.
So preemption link is relevant, I think; and at any rate, helpful to give background to those not familiar with the concept, which constitutes the field against which this is happening.
Also why are they small federal government states rights for things but big federal government centralized power for this? It doesn't make sense to me.
I think the message between the lines is what's important, and it goes like this:
"We in the executive branch have an agreement with the Supreme Court allowing us to bypass congress and enact edicts. We will do this by sending the Justice Department any state law that gets in the way of our donors, sending the layup to our Republican Supreme Court, who will dunk on the States for us and nullify their law."
We don't have to go through the motions of pretending we still live in a constitutional republic, it's okay to talk frankly about reality as it exists.
It goes deeper than that - the Supreme Council will issue non-binding "guidance" on the "shadow docket", so that when/if the fascists/destructionists [0] lose the Presidency, they can go back to being obstructionists weaponizing high-minded ideals in bad faith. As a libertarian, the way I see it is we can disagree politically on what constitutes constructive solutions, but it's time to unite, stop accepting any of the fascists' nonsense, and take back the fucking government - full support for the one remaining mainstream party that at least nominally represents the interests of the United States, while demanding they themselves stop preemptively appeasing the fascists. The Libertarian, Green, or even new parties can step up as the opposition. Pack the courts with judges that believe in America first and foremost, make DC and PR states to mitigate the fascists' abuse of the Senate, and so on. After we've stopped the hemorrhaging, work on fundamental things like adopting ranked pairs voting instead of this plurality trash.
[0] I'd be willing to call them something else if they picked an honest name for themselves - they are most certainly not "conservatives"
It's right in the text of the EO: they intend to argue that the state laws are preempted by existing federal regulations, and they also direct the creation of new regulations to create preemption if necessary, specifically calling on the FCC and FTC to make new federal rules to preempt disfavored state laws. Separately it talks about going to Congress for new laws but mostly this lays out an attempt to do it with executive action as much as possible, both through preemption and by using funding to try to coerce the states.
There's a reasonable argument that nationwide regulation is the more efficient and proper path here but I think it's pretty obvious that the intent is to make toothless "regulation" simply to trigger preemption. You don't have to do much wondering to figure out the level of regulation that David Sacks is looking for.
This is quite literally going to lead to a Supreme Court case about Federal Preemption. Bondi will challenge some CA law, they will lose and appeal until they get to the Supreme Court. I don't have any grace to give people at this point, you have to be willingly turning a blind eye if you do not see where this will end up.
Federal preemption requires federal law (aka laws written by congress). How else would it get to the supreme court?
The EO mentions congress passing new law a few times in addition to an executive task force to look into challenging state laws based on constitutional violations or federal statues. That's the only way they'd get in front of a judge.
If the plan is for the executive to invent new laws it's not mapped out in this EO
> Federal preemption requires federal law (aka laws written by congress). How else would it get to the supreme court?
1. No federal preemption currently. (No federal law, therefore no regulation on the matter that should preempt.)
2. State passes and enforces law regarding AI.
3. Trump directs Bondi to challenge the state law on nonsense grounds.
4. In the lawsuit, the state points out that there is no federal preemption; oh yeah, 10th Amendment; and that the administration's argument is nonsense.
5. The judge, say Eileen Cannon, invalidates the state law.
6. Circuit Court reverses.
7. Administration seeks and immediately gets a grant of certiorari — and the preemption matter is in the Supreme Court.
> passing new law … only way they'd get it in front of a judge.
The EO directs Bondi to investigate whether, and argue that, existing executive regulations (presumably on other topics) preempt state legislation.
Regardless, the EO makes it a priority to find and take advantage of some way to challenge and possibly invalidate state laws on the subject. This is a new take on preemption: creation of a state-law vacuum on the subject, through scorched-earth litigation (how Trumpian!), despite an utter absence of federal legislation on the matter.
the Task Force can try to challenge state AI laws. they can file whatever lawsuits they want. they will probably lose most of their suits, because there's very little ground for challenging state AI regulations.
Someone commented that (one of?) the reason that Trump is using EOs so much is probably because is not willing (or able) to actually get deals on in the legislature to pass his policies (or what passes for policy with him).
I think the Administration is likely to get its toys taken away soon.
the Major Questions Doctrine, the end of Chevron deference, the mandate for Article III courts from Jarkesy, have been building towards this for a while. the capstone in this program of weakening the administrative state, overturning Humphrey's Executor when Trump v. Slaughter is decided, will likely revive the Intelligible Principle Doctrine, as Justice Gorsuch has hinted. the same trend is apparent in the IEEPA tariffs case, where non-delegation got a lot of airtime.
EOs lose a lot of their punch when the Executive's delegated rulemaking and adjudication powers are returned back to their rightful owners in the other two branches.
But they rule in his favor more often than not. They gave him freaking immunity for any crimes he may commit. This alone enables him to disregard the law without any fear of repercussions.
> This alone enables him to disregard the law without any fear of repercussions.
That does not apply to his lackeys though (unless there's a preemptive pardon).
If (!) there's a change in the President eventually, there needs to be a reckoning for everyone that didn't push back on instructions/orders (including all the folks down the line who are blowing up (alleged) drug boats).
I fear by reducing control over executive power to one, squishy standard like the Intelligible Principle Doctrine will let SCOTUS pick and choose which laws have intelligible principles. When conservatives are in power, suddenly all laws will have them. And swing back when liberals are in control.
Each EO tests the waters a bit more with what the public and other branches will tolerate. As we’ve seen with numerous orders already, Congress and business will comply early because they think it will benefit them.
Trump thinks himself a king. He acts like it. He’s attempting to normalize his behavior. He can’t deal with the legislature because it turns out white supremacy isn’t that popular. Who knew?
I think the GOP, the right, etc. do propaganda very well. And they’re good at spinning scandals into things their voter base wants to hear. Or just burying them in a way that makes it hard for their base to find.
Even the centrist TV networks are still treating Trump like a normal president. News like the NYTimes does the same, while platforming horrible people in their op ed section.
Edit: anec-data - I have an embarrassing number of family members that voted for him. I asked why and the surprising common thing among all of them was they just didn’t know. The felonies, convictions, scandals, the racism and transphobia. They were just surprised. And they’re not very good at thinking critically about much of it.
Instead they’re voting for some nostalgia and the idea that they felt safer and more secure in their country when they were younger.
I once heard it said that Trump governs like a dictator because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is extremely unpopular and his party holds one of the smallest house majorities ever.
GOP is a party captured by the very wealthy. It’s minority rule because of certain elites’ trillion dollar plans to control all three branches of government and the courts have come to fruition after decades in the works.
After Nixon a lot of lessons were learned, on how to handle scandals and how to ram unpopular policy down America’s throat.
There is a very vocal opposition to Trump. However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
It's easy to get caught in an echo chamber of like-minded individuals and assume everyone disagrees with his policies - but that is far from reality.
> he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
Published today: "Trump's approval rating on the economy hits record low 31%"[1]
> President Trump's approval rating on his longtime political calling card — the economy — has sunk to 31%, the lowest it has been across both of his terms as president, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC.
"Trump's Approval Rating Drops to 36%, New Second-Term Low" [2]
> his all-time low was 34% in 2021, at the end of his first term after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The man is only two points above where he was when every reputable institution on the planet was running away from him as fast as possible, and he was nearly convicted in the senate. Less than a year into the term.
Yeah it'd be a wild view to call him among the most popular. But he is actually [0] pretty standard for a modern president - probably the least popular [1] but he doesn't stand out that much among the Bush/Biden/Obama polling except that it appears people understood what he was going to do before he entered office instead of discovering it on the way through.
And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.
[1] I'd argue better than that loser Bush who was probably the worst president in modern US history and who's polling showed it, but for the sake of keeping things simple.
> And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.
I think you can go further, the ratings are also heavily tied to things like gasoline prices and the overall economy, and generally things the president has little control over. So actually not much to do with their policies at all. I think Trump knows this and it's why he's done some strategically stupid things to the US fossil fuel industry in order to tactically bring down gasoline prices to juice his ratings.
This likely also explains the 2024 election, because it happened in the context of vast sums of money being sucked out of the economy as the fed tried to fight inflation. Incumbents globally got an absolute thrashing that year regardless of what their actual policies were.
> However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
You might want to look up those data yourself because uh he's actually unpopular in those metrics.
Approval - 42.5% [1]. Much better than Trump's love interest Biden's 37.1% [2] but being below 50% is unpopular.
Popular Vote / Electoral Vote - 49.8%, 312. I may need to tell you this so I will. 50% is greater than 49.8%; a majority of voters (nevermind the country) did not want Trump. As before, this is better than Biden's 306 and Trump1's 304 but worse than Obama2 (332), Obama1 (365) and in general 312 (57%) is nothing to write home about.
Any company dumb enough to try to use this to ignore actual state law will get what they deserve. No state court will give them a pass when they claim an EO has any force of law or that it was reasonable to rely on it.
Even given the current state of things (I’m a lawyer, so well aware) I would put money on this
Like most of what Trump does it's 1000% emo and also very stupid. It's proudly anti-democratic and fundamentally disrespectful of American values.
People fall for it because fear of foreign rivals, frustration with a regulatory patchwork, and anti‑“ideological” backlash make a centralized, tough‑sounding fix emotionally satisfying. Big Tech and national‑security rhetoric also create an illusion that “dominance” equals safety and prosperity, short‑circuiting careful federalism and due process.
Just like the last time Trump was president he is far from a traditional conservative regarding small government. People pretend the 2010 tea party is the same thing as Trump as some sort of gotcha, but he's never been that way. He's always been very assertive regarding expanding executive and federal power.
No one is surprised about that guy, those comments usually point out how "the 2010 tea party", and everyone else from the decades, if not centuries, of the conservative milieu, are suddenly all in on this.
I agree, the main reason is he has been very effective with his cult of personality to get most of the republican congressmen in line. They lose elections if they don't and politicians aren't known for sticking to their values once in power.
The actual small government republican congressmen like https://x.com/justinamash have been very critical of Trump's power grabs but he lost political favor doing so
It's never been about principles of states rights. It's always about disliking specific national policies and spinning the argument to make it sound as if it's about a reasonable principle.
> shall, in consultation with the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto
It's funny to me that they categorise AI and crypto together like this, two technologies that have nothing to do with each other (other than both being favoured by grifters).
The regulation vs innovation framing is a false dichotomy here. Most developed economies have found that thoughtful regulation enables _sustainable_ innovation - see GDPR and data privacy innovation, or pharma regulations driving R&D.
For AI specifically, baseline standards around model documentation, data sourcing transparency, and compute auditing would actually help larger players (who can afford compliance) and reduce race-to-bottom dynamics that harm smaller developers.
> Earlier this week, he reiterated that sentiment in a post on Truth Social, saying: “We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors
It’s hard to tell if what he says is even relate to what he will do. A hardline on semiconductors to China faded this week when he needed some economic stimulation.
So when states without AI data centers seek to ameliorate tax and zoning obstacles, it won’t be Federal preemption in their way, but what benefits Trump.
In particular, the bulk of the substantial text of the order has a pretty clear culture war bend with all the talk about how truthful AI is. This is in large part a fight over the political leaning of AI models.
> Republicans earlier this year failed to pass a similar 10-year moratorium on state laws that regulate AI as part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with the Senate voting 99-1 to remove that ban from the legislation. Trump’s order resurrects that effort, which failed after bipartisan pushback and Republican infighting, but as an order that lacks the force of law. [0]
> Trump has framed the need for comprehensive AI regulation as both a necessity for the technology’s development and as a means of preventing leftist ideology from infiltrating generative AI – a common conservative grievance among tech leaders such as Elon Musk.
On the other hand ..... Grok and others ...
From the party of "states rights" and "small government"
In a parallel universe, the government in the 20th century signed bills protecting tobacco giants from State regulation to encourage investments furthering the country’s international competitiveness in the tobacco industry.
In a parallel universe tobacco is critical to the national security interest of the state. I feel you and other commenters in this thread are ignoring the fact that the outcome of the next war will likely be decided on the cyber front.
More than anything, they need to match and then exceed Singapore's text and data mining exception for copyrighted works. I'll be happy to tell them how since I wrote several versions of it trying to balance all sides.
The minimum, though, is that all copyrighted works the supplier has legal access to can be copied, transformed arbitrarily, and used for training. And they can share those and transformed versions with anyone else who already has legal access to that data. And no contract, including terms of use, can override that. And they can freely scrape it but maybe daily limits imposed to avoid destructive scraping.
That might be enough to collect, preprocess, and share datasets like The Pile, RefinedWeb, uploaded content the host shares (eg The Stack, Youtube). We can do a lot with big models trained that way. We can also synthesize other data from them with less risk.
White House AI czar and Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks elaborated on the rationale for the executive order in a post on X.
Sacks argued that this domain of “interstate commerce” was “the type of economic activity that the Framers of the Constitution intended to reserve for the federal government to regulate.”
At the Oval Office signing ceremony, Sacks said, "We have 50 states running in 50 different directions. It just doesn't make sense."
I'd like to point out that the South was only a fan of States Rights exactly insofar as they let them do slavery. The millisecond it came to forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves, they suddenly weren't the same principled supporters of devolving and federating power. Funny how that works.
And just in case it wasn't clear enough already: one of the first acts of the Confederacy was to draft a provisional constitution which explicitly authorized slavery, and which prohibited either Congress or any state from passing laws to the contrary.
Many of the ills currently befalling the US can be traced to the New Deal era. Including, of course, an HN favorite: our system of employer-sponsored health insurance.
The "The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies." seems like quite the federal overreach never mind the court decision.
> Sacks argued that this domain of “interstate commerce” was “the type of economic activity that the Framers of the Constitution intended to reserve for the federal government to regulate.”
They did indeed. It’s explicitly delegated to congress which declined to pass a law like this.
The EO is just obviously null and void in the face of any relevant state law.
An EO is not law - the hard part is going to be to get congress onboard. Trump is losing political steam and AI is widely unpopular. Most of this country feels AI is going take their job, poison their children, and increase energy prices.
Right. Congress has the power to preempt state law in an area related to interstate commerce by legislating comprehensive rules. The executive branch does not have the authority to do that by itself.
This is like Trump's "pardon" of someone serving time for a state crime. It does little if anything.
Quite a number of AI-related bills have been introduced in Congress, but very few have made much progress. Search "AI" on congress.gov.
As expected, the stupidest imaginable policy. Take all the guardrails completely off, even though the ones that are in place are already toothless. Don't worry, the free market will ensure that everything is turned into paperclips at the maximum possible speed.
Where this is really going: AI is the boogie man they are going to try to use to infiltrate and take over computing, it's 90s cryptowars 3.0
The pivot will be when they starting talking about AGI and it's dangers and how it must be regulated! (/clutches pearls)... right now they are at the "look at AI we need it it's awesome" stage.
Pure nepotism. Trump also recently softened on cannabis. Who is involved in cannabis (and Adderall) startups? David Sacks, "Crypto and AI czar" and YouTube pundit.
We were promised a better economy, better job chances, and better housing by Mr. Sacks on YouTube.
Instead we get "crypto", "AI" and addictive substance grifting.
Perhaps folks should take some time to realize they've been conned by people whose only interest is their own personal weatlh and power, and will promise anything like "prices are going down day one" or "your income and networth will DOUBLE if you elect me" to get elected.
It could have some teeth considering that the whole point is the executive office is going to establish a task force that investigates state laws in opposition of this federal deregulation of AI. Any states deemed to be out of sync will have certain kinds of federal funding cut from them.
There are a lot of states, and especially state universities, that will not like that.
The Executive can't actually cut approriated federal funding, since budgets are congress's job.
The executive, in fact, must spend money that congress appropriates. Unless it is illegal/et al to do so, or the funding otherwise allows prseidential discretion, they are required to do so.
Yes, they did some EO's purporting to cut funding. None that related to non-discretionary funding have been upheld, even by "trump" judges, and so far all non-discretionary (IE explicitly directed by congress) funding cut has been restored, AFAIK. All are a wildly clear violation of separation of powers, and so far no judge has disagreed.
(Though don't confuse whether they have to spend the money the way congress directs with whether they can or can't fire federal employees, etc)
There is a path to the president impounding appropriated money through the impoundment control act, but they haven't done it or followed the process so far.
Is it me or does this seem like naked corruption at its worst? These tech CEOs hang out at the White House and donate to superfluous causes and suddenly the executive is protecting their interests. This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.
> This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.
Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
We regulate medicine, nuclear technology, television, movies, monopolies, energy, financial services, etc. because these things can be harmful if left solely to the market. Americans value honest work, dignity, prosperity and equal opportunity. Innovation is useful in so far as it enables our values - regulation is not counter to Americans interests, it protects them.
I feel like anyone making this argument hasn't studied how those regulations happened.
They ALL happened AFTER people got hurt. That's how we do things here. We always have.
It's kind of messed up, but the alternative is a bunch of rules on things that wouldn't be a real problem.
Who got hurt before the US banned the export of cryptography?
That wasn't in the list above. We were talking primarily about consumer/market protections.
Rubyfan mentioned nuclear technology, which like cryptography, has a broad scope and military applications so isn’t something that was just left to the market to decide the best fit.
I don’t think I’ve left the scope of this discussion.
I was more talking about the consumer radiation side. Radium water to drink, women licking and painting radium watch dials. Toy physics kits for kids with uranium in it. Uranium glass also isn't great.
I mean the radium fad just by itself was pretty crazy, people used radium suppositories and radium makeup.
The CIA, probably.
Cracking Enigma was a big deal in WW2. Germany got hurt real bad.
It’s a lot harder to put the genie back in the bottle once out.
AI is already hurting people. We need regulation to hold it and its benefactors accountable. The federal government is preempting states from doing so.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgerwp7rdlvo
https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-teen-confided-in-an-ai-c...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/openai-sued-by-7-families-for-all...
https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/chatgpt-murder-suicide-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/tens-thousand...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/17/tech/electricity-bill-price-i...
I don't think you realize the level of damage it generally takes to get bipartisan support for creation of an oversight body.
It was popularized that an estimated 8,000 infant deaths attributed to swill milk occured every year in NYC in the 1850s (take with a grain of salt).
Even more recently much of the banking regulation only occured after severe market issues that broadly impacted the economy.
On a related note: "Layoffs" are going to be a hard practical harm point to rally around. Unless we fundamentally change the nature of our economy (Which doesn't tend to happen until the previous system collapses.), effeciency is king. Tha market isn't rational, but effeciency is a competitive advantage that compounds over time. So you have a prisoners dilemma here. If you want to restrict a technology that boosts efficiency, you either have to close your market and then put up rules that constrain efficiency or you bleed your prosperity.
The latter is called the EU.
Why?
Because that's what the people who made all of those rules decided to call themselves.
> We regulate medicine, nuclear technology, television, movies, monopolies, energy, financial services, etc.
Many of those regulations at the federal level, yes?
>Many of those regulations at the federal level, yes?
In addition to ones at state level, yes.
Sure. And this is not that. This says: before we begin to think about our policy let's make sure to remove any barriers for Mr. Altman and friends so that they don't get sucked down with their Oracle branded boat anchor.
If this had any whiff of actually shedding light on these needed regulations the root OP wouldn't have said what they did. But for now I'm going to head over to Polymarket and see if there are any bets I can place on Trump's kids being appointed to the OpenAI board.
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Not true that US is 100% gas pedal constantly on innovation. You’re forgetting labor reform movements and the service switch away from industry in the last few decades. Also the de-science-ing of the current admin has vastly reduced our innovative capacity, as well as the virtual decapitation of brain drain. Those next generation of brightest immigrants certainly aren’t coming here to deal with ICE, and that’s been the source of half the great minds in our country throughout its history, gone because of racism.
I kind of doubt American scientists will leave en masse to go elsewhere. Their options are only Europe, the UK, or China. Most will not be willing to give up the salaries or the resources available to scientists in the USA, even with the current administration, to go live in strongly hierarchical academic systems that they don’t know how to navigate. Especially not for a 30% salary reduction (or more if they go someplace like France or Italy).
Reread what the previous poster said. They were talking about folks coming to the US. Around 50% of doctorate level scientists and graduate students in STEM come from outside the US.
Canada? Australia? 30% (or more) salary cut certainly applies but academic systems are similar and resources are in the same ballpark at top research universities.
They don't have to go anywhere if they just don't come here. American science works on the back of underpaid foreign born graduate students. If they aren't there, neither is American science. It's already started. And that's not even considering the other 'reforms' currently deliberately crushing academia. The first thing a new fascist regime needs to crush is the immigrants, and the second is academia. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/graduate-studen...
The case against this EO is not “banning new technology”. It’s not allowing the federal government to ban any state regulation. And states having the power to make their own rules is maybe the most American value.
It's not even that, as this isn't Federal Law.
What ISNT an American value is Executive Orders trying to trump State powers without actual legislation.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption
Until that "innovation and disruption" threatens any established player, at which point they run crying to the government to grease some palms. China is innovating and disrupting the entire energy sector via renewables and battery storage while the US is cowering in the corner trying to flaccidly resuscitate the corpse of the coal industry.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
Where did you get the idea that this was the cause that created millions of jobs and lead to the US running the world's largest economy, and not say - the knock-on effects of the US joining WW2 relatively late and unscathed, making it the only major world power left with a functioning enough industrial complex to export to war-ravaged Europe?
I see your point, but that is definitely not the only cause of American economic dominance. The U.S. has been the largest economy by GDP since ca 1900 – i.e. before the wars.
There is more to history than ww2.
There is more to a discussion than strawmen.
The patent system. I know someone will respond detailing why the patent system is pro-business, but it is objectively government regulation that puts restrictions on new technology, so it's proof that regulation of that sort is at least an American tradition if not fully an "American value".
Patents and trademarks are the only ways to create legal monopolies. They are/were intended to reward innovation but despite good intentions are abused.
Not exactly. For example, Major League Baseball has been granted an anti-trust exemption by the US Supreme Court, because they said it was not a business. In some cases in which firms have been found guilty of violating the anti-trust laws, they were fined amounts minuscule in relation to the profits they gained by operating the monopoly. Various governments in the US outsource public services to private monopolies, and the results have sometimes amounted to a serious restraint of trade. The chicanery goes back a long way. For the first decade or so after the passage of the Sherman Act, it was not used against the corporate monopolies that it was written to limit; it was invoked only against labor unions trying to find a way to get a better deal out of the firms operating company stores and company towns etc, etc. Then Teddy Roosevelt, the so-called trust-buster, invoked it under the assumption that he could tell the difference between good and bad monopolies and that he had the power to leave the good monopolies alone. 120 years later, we are in the same sorry situation.
Intellectual property restrictions cause harm even when used as intended. They are an extreme rest restriction on market activity and I believe they cause more harm than good.
Patents, trademarks, copyright, deeds and other similar concepts are part of what makes capitalism what it is, without them capitalism will not work because they are the mechanisms that enforce private property.
Good luck with that. When 3/4 of the world laughs at your patent what is the point of patents? IP only works when everyone agrees to it. When they don't it's just a handicap on the ones who do that benefits nobody.
Maybe it should be. The system here in the US has produced some great innovations at the cost of great misery among the non-wealthy. At a time when technology promises an easier life, it only seems to benefit the wealthy, while trying to discard everyone else. The light at the end of the tunnel is a 1%-er about to laughingly crush you beneath their wheels.
I don't think this is the strongest argument. Every technological revolution so far has initially benefited the wealthy and taken a generation or two for its effects to lift the masses out of previous levels of poverty, but ultimately each one has.
To me the stronger argument about AI is that this revolution won't. And that's because this one is not really about productivity or even about capital investment in things that people nominally would want (faster transport, cheaper cotton, home computers). This one is about ending revolution once and for all; it's not about increeasing the wealth of the wealthy, it's about being the first to arrive at AGI and thus cementing that wealth disparity for all perpetuity. It's the endgame.
I don't know if that's true, but that's to me the argument as to why this one is exceptional and why the capitalist argument for American prosperity is inapplicable in this case.
I don't know about for all perpetuity. If history has shown, anyone that reaches the pinnacle eventually becomes complacent, technology improves by becoming faster/cheaper/smaller. That just means it is prime to always be susceptible to a new something coming along that stands on the shoulders of what came before without having to pay for it. They start where the current leader fought to achieve.
The idea behind self improving AGI is that it will "get" every "new something coming along" before everyone else.
I personally believe magical unicorns are going to save us
Self-improving AI is a rhetorical sleight of hand to make you think that.
Just because it can self improve doesn't mean it improves better than everything else or without substantial costs to develop improvement.
We have had the capacity to have zero poverty for many decades, maybe over a century. China eliminated extreme poverty.
I don’t know about that. The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America. While American capitalism has many faults, oppressing the bottom quintile is not one of them. The US median income is consistently top ten globally.
Median income doesn't tell much if you don't factor in the cost of living. My salary sucks compared to what I would earn in America, but when I factor in things like free healthcare, daycare and higher level education, I'm better off here.
What countries offer free daycare? I know there are a few in Europe. It's not super common, so I'm curious to know where
I believe Sweden is one: https://www.sdg16.plus/policies/universal-childcare-model-sw...
That doesn't look free. Subsidized, yes. Lots of countries subsidize childcare. Including every US state
Sure, but extremely cheap collared with the us.
Here's a UNICEF report comparing childcare policy amongst rich countries: https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/where-do-rich-count...
Sweden ranks third in the comparison metric (what good is free childcare if it is very bad or inaccessible?), and the us ranks 40th out of 41.
>The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America
Immigration to the USA, both illegal and legal, has cratered.
This is completely wrong. Even “the poor” in most parts of the world has a pretty good life weight where they are.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w&pp=ygUMSGFucyByb3N...
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption
Arguably true, but it's also been way ahead of the pack (people tend to forget this) on protection for organized labor, social safety net entitlements, and regulation of harmful industrial safety and environmental externalities.
This statement is awfully one-sided.
I am not sure you can call it being 'ahead of the pack' when we are currently furiously disassembling those forward thinking ideas.
> Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Copyright law is another counter-example to your argument. But somehow? that’s no longer a concern if you have enough money. I guess the trick is to steal from literally everyone so that no one entity can claim any measurable portion of the output as damages.
I’ve always thought Copyright should be way shorter than it is, but it’s suspect that we’re having a coming to Jesus moment about IP with all the AI grifting going on.
Copyright has nothing to do with banning technology. It is a set of rules around a particular kind of property rights.
There are things you can do with technology that are banned as a result of copyright protections, but the underlying technologies are not banned, only the particular use of them is.
I’m saying if the law was respected at all this technology would be banned. I don’t know that I prefer that outcome, but it is the truth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
The question isn’t the jobs created but how have workers benefited from increased productivity? They haven’t materially since late 1970s. That’s when the American labor movement began its decline. Innovation isn’t what helps workers. The gains from innovation have to be wrenched from the hands of the ruling class through organized resistance.
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I think your take is historically accurate. Although one does wonder how long we'll be able to get away with keeping the pedal to the metal. It might be worth taking a moment to install a steering wheel. Rumor has it there are hazards about.
That's lobbying simplified, no need to pay lobbyist.
This is a tribute system, way past lobbying. Lobbying is cheap, Senators can be bought off for 5-figure sums. CEOs pay lobbyists so they don't have to meet with them personally. What's happening now involves CEOs appearing at political events and lobbying the president personally, to the tune of millions of dollars in declared "donations" for "ballroom construction", in exchange for security guarantees for their business empires.
Lobbying is tightly regulated, and the FEC really does keep a close eye.
This is just flat out bribery, using the thinnest of legal fig leaves. Which would not possibly pass muster if he hadn't also packed the court with supporters.
> does keep a close eye
"kept", I think.
I'm in agreement because what is there to say about AI policy?
This govt clearly isn't going to regulate against harms like perpetuating systems of racism. This government adores to perpetuate systems of racism.
So fuck it. Let's race to the bottom like the companies want to so badly.
You don’t seem to appreciate: they paid for the ballroom. They have a right to set policy. That’s how an oligarchy works
That’s how campaign contributions have worked for a long time. Now it’s just a touch more blatant.
The rest of the world has always called it corruption.
Is it you? I mean, the guy started his term by launching a scam coin along with his wife. He hates the United States and sees it as just something to exploit for financial gain and power. That's it. That's literally all there is to all of his actions.
Par for the course with this administration.
Just another step towards Russian style naked oligarchy.
For this brief moment in time, crime is legal.
The US was founded on crime. We are a colonial imperial country with a penchant for using racism and religion in order to maintain a certain lifestyle for white supremacists.
Slavery was really not that long ago, we are still actively invading countries and murdering people for oil, and we help bankroll straight up genocide in regions such as Darfur and Palestine.
This is business as usual.
We still do slavery and it's even kept in the 13th amendment as a punishment.
Whats wrong if US population has voted for this? There was no surprises this time - everyone can expect what is going to happen.
Didn’t the majority of people vote to “drain the swamp” and “bring down the cost of living”?
People had nearly a decade of experience with Donald Trump as a known political entity and decades of receipts and lawsuits prior to 2016 to speak to his amoral and corrupt nature. If they didn't know exactly what they were buying into they were idiots. He isn't exactly a master manipulator.
Also, The first time Trump was elected, the majority of voters went for Hillary Clinton. Second time, it was still 49% versus 48% for Kamala Harris. The majority of Americans have never voted for Donald Trump nor ever supported him.
I actually don't want to suffer just because my neighbor is racist.
I'm not saying I support either. I am just looking at US politics from outside. But this is how your democracy system works.
You asked, "Whats wrong if US population has voted for this?" in response to someone complaining that the system is not working, and so I explained it: the rest of us are not represented. I'm unsure what point you're getting at.
My point is: presidents are not delivered to your country by president delivery alien space ship. A lot of people voted for him and this is a fact. You cant just blame everyone of them for being dumb or racist. If you dont like their choice that means you should starting to do something about it.
Authorithorianism also not just happen - it take years to build and destroy institutions. It took 20 years to build fascist regime in my country.
Sorry for not making it clear enough.
It is definitely naked corruption. Lobbying was always around, but I would say that with this administration things are a lot more transactional and a lot more in the open. Companies like Palantir and Anduril and others are being gifted contracts all over the place - that’s money we taxpayers are losing.
> Companies like . . . Anduril are being gifted contracts all over the place - that’s money we taxpayers are losing.
Can you point to a concrete example of this?
It's hard to say what they're actually qualified to do but they went from receiving 1 or 2 contracts per year in the early 2020s for a few 10s of millions and I think one larger $200M one to this since Trump was reelected;
$200M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/1527a7adaff14a5280fc7...
$140M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/c0203e75ec2949e78966f...
$31M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/8b0b944955064864942fc...
$1M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/86d997fbd8a74d0cb298c...
$642M over 10 years - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/c9878b113f5143cba7edb...
$3.1M - https://sam.gov/opp/f15d4b63ebc846cd9f4870cfa0772fff/view
$160M - https://www.anduril.com/news/anduril-awarded-contract-to-red...
$86M - https://www.anduril.com/news/special-operations-command-sele...
$100M - https://www.anduril.com/news/anduril-awarded-usd99-6m-for-u-...
tbh there's nothing weird about those.
The Marine Corps I-CsUAS award is explicitly described as an IDIQ with a maximum dollar value of $642M over 10 years -- though it could be much less -- and reporting indicates it was competitively procured with 10 offerors. It wasn't "gifted"/"no-bid"
Also: $642M spread over 10 years is roughly $64M/year at the ceiling, and ceilings are often not fully used. That scale is not remotely unusual for a program-of-record counter-UAS capability if the government believes the threat is persistent. (Which it does.)
The rest are similarly mundane and justifiable.
Here's what would be weird: Repeated sole-source awards where a competitive approach is feasible, implausible technical scope relative to deliverables, unjustified pricing, or political intervention affecting downselects. I don't see any of that here. (But, okay, let's not talk about Palantir, lol.)
It is well known in Defense circles that much of what Anduril does comes in on no-bid black budget contracts. Often short duration or low volume.
Imagine Silicon Valley CEOs pumped full of VC dollars and embedded with units that Don't Exist in places We Were Never At.
You aren't missing anything. This is oligarchic capture of the government.
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I think people commonly use the word to refer to business oligarchs, which are not technically government:
"A business oligarch is generally a business magnate who controls sufficient resources to influence national politics."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_oligarch
> protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes
So where is this coalition that’s organized to actually make this real?
Software engineers are allergic to unionization (despite the recent id win) and 100% of capital owners (this is NOT business owner and operators I’m talking about LPs and Fund Managers) are in support of labor automation as a priority, the same people also run every government and overwhelmingly select the politicians available to vote for, so who will fund and lead your advocacy?
Game developers are subject to much more abuse than the average software engineering job, for less pay. It's a different environment.
I'm open to the idea of guilds, but personally I do not want others negotiating for me with the type of work I do, I'd prefer it to be a contract between me, my employer and nothing else. Unions aren't always a net benefit for every industry.
Of course, with AI going the way it is, collective bargaining might become more attractive in our field. But institutions can be slow to catch up and not everyone always agrees with the outcome. Personally, if I worked in Hollywood, I'd be upset about the kind of anti-AI scaremongering and regulation taking place in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.
This is the most pro-tech admin in decades, and that terrifies me.
did you not see who was standing next to him. All of the top tech bros of silicon valley in their search for the fountain of youth.
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>which translates to higher wages for U.S.-based workers.
In what world do you live in and are you taking refugees?
This is not at all how this works. First people to see higher monies are the shareholders and only the shareholders.
> Higher productivity is also why jobs pay so much more in the U.S. than the E.U.
You mean the top tier jobs or the bottom 90%?
They pay so much more because the US is very ok with big income inequality.
Those unions represent a much bigger share of the population, so shouldn't they have more away in a democratic system (where demos is people)
Median income and the purchasing power of disposable income are substantially higher in the U.S.
The public sector unions do represent a much larger share of the population than the CEOs but in absolute terms public sector workers constitute a very small share of the population, while receiving a large share of public spending. Given they are being rewarded with huge amounts of tax dollars from the party they help keep/put in power, the concern that there's a systemic pay-to-play dynamic at work is very justified.
> but in absolute terms public sector workers constitute a very small share of the population, while receiving a large share of public spending
Uh... Just no? Public spending? That's défense, health care, entitlements etcetera etcetera
I'll actually back it up with some numbers too:
> That’s 1% of gross domestic product, and almost 5% of total federal spending. The government payroll for other developed countries is typically 5% of GDP, Kettl said.
From: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/03/06/federal-workers...
And this
> Median income and the purchasing power of disposable income are substantially higher in the U.S.
Not sure what you're basing that on but there's this too > The statistic is used to show how unequal things have become in the U.S.: Some 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with even $400 to pay for an unexpected bill
From: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2021/what-a-400-dolla...
So unless they're all spending money irrationally, they have no money to save meaning little or no disposable income
Disposable income is essentially just income after tax. It’s the amount you have where you get to direct where it goes / how you dispose of it. It’s not money after essentials.
There are many ways to slice it but the US median income is high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
TIL, I've always thought it was minus housing etc.
Apparently that's discretionary income.
If we use BEA/FRED "compensation of employees" (wages + benefits), the payroll picture is:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A4076C0A144NBEA
All US government employees (federal + state + local): $2.409T in 2023.
US nominal GDP in 2023: $27.812T.
So government compensation = ~8.7% of GDP (2.409 / 27.812).
Breakdown (2023):
Federal government compensation: $634.9B (~2.3% of GDP).
State + local compensation: $1.7846T (~6.4% of GDP).
State/local education: $863.1B
State/local other: $783.2B
For cross-country median disposable income comparisons, OECD has a direct chart:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
Your $400 stat is about liquidity and balance-sheet fragility; it doesn't tell you the cross-country level of median PPP-adjusted disposable income. OECD Figure 4.1 is the relevant comparison.
Generally, countries with more government social spending have lower savings rates, because people irresponsibly rely on the taxpayer as their backstop, so I'm not surprised at all. The U.S. actually has very high levels of social spending, despite the stereotype of it being a very free-market-oriented economy. That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.
Since you took the data for federal and state and local, you end up with 22.51 million employees[1].
Out of a total number of employed people of ~160M that's 1 in 8 employees. If you're calling 1 in 8 'a small share' the we just disagree there.
As to the $400 statistic, let me just point out that this
> That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.
Is very much an opinion, not a fact.
Maybe there's also that for the low income earners there isn't any money left after paying for housing, food and such. And I'm not even talking about health insurance.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/204535/number-of-governm...
> AI agents being able to do jobs means more income for U.S.-based companies, which translates to higher wages for U.S.-based workers.
Um, no. Higher productivity translates to greater return on equity for those that hold it, not necessarily workers.
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> we need a hyper-productive world where someone working a few hours a year generates enough wealth to secure a comfortable lifestyle up there with the best of them.
This is naive, productivity increases had decoupled from compensation a long time ago. See https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ for example. AI certainly can create wealth, and in fact already did (hey NVDA), but somehow that did not trickle down. I think more likely than not, AI will further stratify our society.
Why then, outside of Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the UAE (All of which are tiny countries, and at least two of them are Petrostates), does the United States have the world's highest median income with a population of over 342 million people?
The typical American is insanely wealthy by global standards.
Sure, the USA is in the top five in terms of median income. They are also tied for first for having the highest cost of living.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-l...
> They are also tied for first for having the highest cost of living.
Who cares?
Absolute savings rate and net worth are what matter.
Any European will gladly live in America for US$1 million/year income even if the cost of living is US$300k/year.
Americans at every wealth level live shorter lives than e.g. Brits.
https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774...
> Absolute savings rate and net worth are what matter.
OK, now tell me how the savings and net worth look like for your average American. I'll give you a bit of a spoiler: it's not good.
Who the fuck do you know that makes a million dollars a year? The majority of Americans barely clear that bar over their entire career.
Wealth inequality is worse now than the era of robber barons & gilded age.
Who cares? If higher wealth inequality produces a higher standard of living for the majority (note, median not mean), I’m all for it. Policy should not be driven by envy.
You should care because people vote and the social consequences are going to be devastating.
It is easy for me to take this perspective too because I never had much student debt or children.
The median though is getting crushed if they went to college and are paying for daycare.
If you are getting crushed for going to school and having children that is a pretty clear breakdown of the social contract.
The consequences are obvious. People are going to vote in socialist policies and the whole engine is going to get thrown in reverse.
The "let them eat cake" strategy is never the smart strategy.
It is not obvious at all our system is even compatible with the internet. If the starting conditions are 1999, it would seem like the system is imploding. It is easy to pretend like everything is working out economically when we borrowed 30 trillion dollars during that time from the future.
> The median though is getting crushed if they went to college and are paying for daycare.
> If you are getting crushed for going to school and having children that is a pretty clear breakdown of the social contract.
That isn't a factor in wealth inequality. Inequality is how much money they have relative to people like Musk and Bezos - or just local business owners. The poor side of that comparison always has such little wealth/income that their circumstances don't really matter. Someone poor will be sitting in the +-$100k band and not be particularly creditworthy. When compared to a millionaire the gap is still going to be about a million dollars whether they're on the crushed or non-crushed side of the band.
Part of the reason the economic situation gets so bad is because people keep trying to shift the conversation to inequality instead of talking about what actually matters - living standards and opportunities. And convincing people to value accumulating capital, we're been playing this game for centuries, inter-generational savings could have had a real impact if people focused on being effective about it.
It isn't, so now what?
In the gilded age people were worth a larger fraction of the entire country’s GDP than today. Rockefeller alone was something like 2% of GDP.
The 1870-1900 period experienced the greatest expansion of U.S. industry, and the fastest rise in both U.S. wages and U.S. life expectancy, in history.
But it's not like AI did any of that...
Right we had a functioning labor movement to thank for productivity gains being distributed to the working class. When that got undermined beginning late seventies early 80s with offshoring we see wealth just flowing to the top without significantly benefiting the working class.
Past innovation did though.
Insanely wealthy when your comparison includes tin pot dictatorships, theocracies, and ex-soviet countries that still haven't gotten their shit together. Weird how that unimaginable wealth doesn't translate into financial security, access to high quality healthcare, or the ability to own a home.
> for example. AI certainly can create wealth, and in fact already did (hey NVDA), but somehow that did not trickle down.
The millions of people who use NVDA’s products do not get value from it? Isn’t it making their lives richer?
If your employer gets you a nvda card or openai subscription, it doesn't automatically mean you are getting richer, agreed?
And the richness of life it's another philosophical discussion altogether...
When statistical artifacts are controlled for, it shows that there's been almost no gap between productivity and compensation growth:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sources-of-real-wage-stag...
The EPI is also not a credible source, given who funds it.
I don't know why you think that graph is contradicting me, if wages and productivity aren't linked having people do make-work is even more stupid! They're already doing work that they aren't even being compensated for, fighting to preserve that when the work doesn't need to be done is legitimately crazy. It'd be fighting for the right to do work that isn't being compensated for and isn't useful. One of the rare situations that is even worse than just straight paying people to not do anything. I'm seeing a scenario where we have such high individual productivity that everyone can live a very comfortable life. If in practice the way it is working is a couple of people do all the work and the benefits are divvied up among everyone else then that hardly undermines the vision.
Although if we're talking the optimum way of organising society, y'know, re-linking wages and productivity is a probably a good path. This scheme of not rewarding productive people has seen the US make a transition from growth hub of the world to being out-competed by nominal Communists. They aren't exactly distinguishing themselves with that strategy.
But humans aren't more productive for the most part. What had made people more productive is, for the most part, mechanization, computerization, and other tech tree improvements.
Even though everyone didn't get rich from the industrial revolution, ultimately people led easier lives, more stuff, and less work.
I read that a peasant in the middle ages typically worked less and had much more leisure than a worker in the 21st century.
Peasants in the Middle Ages did hard, agrarian labor, had poor sanitation, high child mortality, and limited horizons. While nobles had wealth and comfort, the era was generally harsh, with most lacking modern amenities and facing short, physically demanding lives.
You can achieve medieval peasent level of life quality by not working at all these days.
You've read that they had more days off but that's only because they couldn't work in the winter.
Instead, they hoped the food stores would last and the kids wouldn't die so they could help work the land next year.
I’m not an expert but my understanding is a slow migration from agriculture oriented jobs to industrial to information jobs. Yes we all have more cheap junk but also economic disparity and a hollowing out of the middle class. That will get worse faster than new types of jobs can be created. Will the new jobs even replace the same levels of income? It seems impossible.
> We aren't going to make the next big leap in lifestyles without doing the same thing to a lot more jobs.
Which planet is going to sustain that? More productivity doesn't add any resources to sustain your lifecycle.
Question number one. Is dominance really a necessary part of a country's existence? Can't you just have peaceful relations and supportive relationships with other countries to live in harmony, when artificial intelligence brings benefits to all countries, not just the USA? Can't you build on the technological foundations that have been laid to create sustainable development for your society?
The desire for more. To have more than others, is a key problem that generates unhealthy politics. Unhealthy foreign policy towards other countries. In your pursuit of being first in everything. Being first in everything, preventing the development of other countries, holding onto technologies for yourself. You create an imbalance. You create an imbalance in the global economy, in politics, in the social sphere, and in the social environment.
Isn't there an alternative to having sustainable development? Built on the principles of mutual support and focused not on dominance, but on collaboration between peaceful states. Between peaceful states.
>~Is dominance necessary?
Not necessarily — it's about respect. And a time-tested method is to exert your dominance (typically with violence). Maintaining power[1] is about maintaining respect [2].
[I love that certain groups of sub-ordinate apes have been observed literally tearing the alpha monkey apart, killing him; effectively ending excessive tyrannies]
As a counter-example, among the most respected persons in a prison system is the one who is generous[0] with their commisary. Snickers bars end wars.
"You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar"
>~The desire for more.
"The problem with always winning is you end up having to win all the time." —John Candy
[0] without reciprical expectations
[1] "everything is about sex, except sex; sex is about POWER" — without further commentary, other than are you reading these headlines (PS: he didn't kill himself)?!
[2] If you have not, Tim Urban's book What's Our Problem[3] is among my favorite datageek sociology books. It helped me better understand both my world and my lawyer brothers. He's the author of the excellent Wait But Why? blog.
[3] <https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Our-Problem-Self-Help-Societies...>
> Can't you just have peaceful relations and supportive relationships with other countries to live in harmony
"I can picture a world without fear, without hate. I can picture us conquering that world, because they'd never expect it."
Yes, dominance is preferred. Countries’ resources aren’t evenly distributed, and this fact determines foreign policy more than anything else.
There’s no world govt or global authority. Every country must look after its own interests.
Having every country cooperate requires trusting some entity as a global enforcer, one that wont abuse their unchecked power. Obviously, america has played this role since ww2 but not without plenty of mistakes and oversights.
We as humans haven’t found an alternative to this yet.
Stasis is the quickest way to be 'sustainible' but is a far from ideal outcome. Even if we ignore the squandered potential, take a look at what happened to Japan and others who pursued policies of stagnation for the sake of stability. The lucky ones only got admiral Perry-ied. The unlucky ones were brutally colonized or conquered. The really unlucky ones no longer exist.
States are what can be called superorganisms literally made entirely out of coercion to get others to serve their goals without their consent. Despite the claims of social contract, nobody ever signed one. Asking statew not to seek dominance is like asking a wolf to take up vegetarianism. They technically could do it but it goes fundamentally against its entire design and purpose.
Not to mention that saying no to 'more' isn't kumbaya everyone has peace and freedom. It means active suppression of ambitions of others. States are made of coercion, remember?
Federal Preemption: A Legal Primer — https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45825
CRS is really underappreciated. Seeing you link that report here made me happy.
What does this have to do with executive orders?
I imagine it’s a nod to the way the stated goal would normally be pursued, but in this case is not.
It sounds like a good idea to establish a uniform national policy! And the federal government can do that (although only for the very specific purposes spelled out in the Constitution). The right way to do that is to pass a law through both houses of Congress, and the president to sign it into law. Maybe the law even specifies a broad framework and authorizes the executive branch to dial in the specific details (although the court seems to be souring on that kind of thing too).
The god-king proclaiming a brand new framework governing a major new sector of the economy To Be So is.. not the normal way
The link is highly relevant to the executive order because this executive order attempts to place limitations on what laws US states can create.
EOs aren't law though. They're guidance for the rest of the executive branch on how to execute the laws written by congress.
The Legislative branch (Congress) not the Executive branch (White House) can preempt states.
That's the whole point. They aren't law, and they were (probably) never meant to be so far-reaching, and yet the clear purpose of this Executive Order is to tell the states what laws they can enact. The EO doesn't have the legal power to do that directly, but it clearly outlines the intention to withdraw federal funding from states that refuse to toe the line.
I don't know if you've heard, but norms don't matter anymore.
Can you guys just read stuff before talking?
> The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to create an “AI Litigation Task Force” within 30 days whose "sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws" that clash with the Trump administration's vision for light-touch regulation.
The EO isn't about Federal Preemption. Trump's not creating a law to preempt states. So a question about how Federal Preemption is relevant is on point.
> My Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard — not 50 discordant State ones. …
Sounds like leaving it up to Congress! But then the administration vows to thwart state laws despite the vacuum of no extant preemption, so effectively imposing a type of supposed Executive preemption:
> Until such a national standard exists, however, it is imperative that my Administration takes action to check the most onerous and excessive laws emerging from the States that threaten to stymie innovation.
So preemption link is relevant, I think; and at any rate, helpful to give background to those not familiar with the concept, which constitutes the field against which this is happening.
Also why are they small federal government states rights for things but big federal government centralized power for this? It doesn't make sense to me.
When you start thinking of the political elite as out of touch sociopathic aristocrats, it becomes easier to understand their behavior.
Their goal is to make money and enrich their own lives at the expense of everyone else.
Stephen Miller is just super weird though. Don’t bother trying to figure that guy out.
I think the message between the lines is what's important, and it goes like this:
"We in the executive branch have an agreement with the Supreme Court allowing us to bypass congress and enact edicts. We will do this by sending the Justice Department any state law that gets in the way of our donors, sending the layup to our Republican Supreme Court, who will dunk on the States for us and nullify their law."
We don't have to go through the motions of pretending we still live in a constitutional republic, it's okay to talk frankly about reality as it exists.
It goes deeper than that - the Supreme Council will issue non-binding "guidance" on the "shadow docket", so that when/if the fascists/destructionists [0] lose the Presidency, they can go back to being obstructionists weaponizing high-minded ideals in bad faith. As a libertarian, the way I see it is we can disagree politically on what constitutes constructive solutions, but it's time to unite, stop accepting any of the fascists' nonsense, and take back the fucking government - full support for the one remaining mainstream party that at least nominally represents the interests of the United States, while demanding they themselves stop preemptively appeasing the fascists. The Libertarian, Green, or even new parties can step up as the opposition. Pack the courts with judges that believe in America first and foremost, make DC and PR states to mitigate the fascists' abuse of the Senate, and so on. After we've stopped the hemorrhaging, work on fundamental things like adopting ranked pairs voting instead of this plurality trash.
[0] I'd be willing to call them something else if they picked an honest name for themselves - they are most certainly not "conservatives"
It's right in the text of the EO: they intend to argue that the state laws are preempted by existing federal regulations, and they also direct the creation of new regulations to create preemption if necessary, specifically calling on the FCC and FTC to make new federal rules to preempt disfavored state laws. Separately it talks about going to Congress for new laws but mostly this lays out an attempt to do it with executive action as much as possible, both through preemption and by using funding to try to coerce the states.
There's a reasonable argument that nationwide regulation is the more efficient and proper path here but I think it's pretty obvious that the intent is to make toothless "regulation" simply to trigger preemption. You don't have to do much wondering to figure out the level of regulation that David Sacks is looking for.
This is quite literally going to lead to a Supreme Court case about Federal Preemption. Bondi will challenge some CA law, they will lose and appeal until they get to the Supreme Court. I don't have any grace to give people at this point, you have to be willingly turning a blind eye if you do not see where this will end up.
Federal preemption requires federal law (aka laws written by congress). How else would it get to the supreme court?
The EO mentions congress passing new law a few times in addition to an executive task force to look into challenging state laws based on constitutional violations or federal statues. That's the only way they'd get in front of a judge.
If the plan is for the executive to invent new laws it's not mapped out in this EO
> Federal preemption requires federal law (aka laws written by congress). How else would it get to the supreme court?
1. No federal preemption currently. (No federal law, therefore no regulation on the matter that should preempt.)
2. State passes and enforces law regarding AI.
3. Trump directs Bondi to challenge the state law on nonsense grounds.
4. In the lawsuit, the state points out that there is no federal preemption; oh yeah, 10th Amendment; and that the administration's argument is nonsense.
5. The judge, say Eileen Cannon, invalidates the state law.
6. Circuit Court reverses.
7. Administration seeks and immediately gets a grant of certiorari — and the preemption matter is in the Supreme Court.
> passing new law … only way they'd get it in front of a judge.
The EO directs Bondi to investigate whether, and argue that, existing executive regulations (presumably on other topics) preempt state legislation.
Regardless, the EO makes it a priority to find and take advantage of some way to challenge and possibly invalidate state laws on the subject. This is a new take on preemption: creation of a state-law vacuum on the subject, through scorched-earth litigation (how Trumpian!), despite an utter absence of federal legislation on the matter.
>2. Trump preemptively threatens to withhold all Federal funding to any state that intends to pass any laws he doesn't like.
>2.5 If it's a blue state, maybe the National Guard and ICE suddenly show up in force for the people's own protection.
>3. States choose entirely of their own volition to comply in advance.
That's probably how this is really going to go.
the Task Force can try to challenge state AI laws. they can file whatever lawsuits they want. they will probably lose most of their suits, because there's very little ground for challenging state AI regulations.
Those suits will be seen by the worst judges the Heritage Foundation could ram through. I would not be nearly so confident of a sane outcome.
peterlk and lesuorac nail it: the EO purports to preempt state law, but EOs aren't law and that's not how preemption works.
Probably something to do with the section titled:
> Sec. 7. *Preemption of State Laws* Mandating Deceptive Conduct in AI Models.
Executive order (EO) count over the last few presidents:
* Bush (41): 166
* Clinton (two terms): 364
* Bush (43; two terms): 291
* Obama (two terms): 276
* Trump (45): 220
* Biden: 162
* Trump (47; <1 year): 218
Source:
* https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or...
Someone commented that (one of?) the reason that Trump is using EOs so much is probably because is not willing (or able) to actually get deals on in the legislature to pass his policies (or what passes for policy with him).
EOs also aren't laws, they're instructions on how to execute policy. This administration treats them as the former.
Everything they do, however, is petty, cruel and nakedly corrupt while also being marred by a total lack of competence.
I think the Administration is likely to get its toys taken away soon.
the Major Questions Doctrine, the end of Chevron deference, the mandate for Article III courts from Jarkesy, have been building towards this for a while. the capstone in this program of weakening the administrative state, overturning Humphrey's Executor when Trump v. Slaughter is decided, will likely revive the Intelligible Principle Doctrine, as Justice Gorsuch has hinted. the same trend is apparent in the IEEPA tariffs case, where non-delegation got a lot of airtime.
EOs lose a lot of their punch when the Executive's delegated rulemaking and adjudication powers are returned back to their rightful owners in the other two branches.
I don't know where you get the confidence that any of that matters to SCOTUS. They know their role, and they are playing.
SCOTUS has ruled against Trump numerous times.
But they rule in his favor more often than not. They gave him freaking immunity for any crimes he may commit. This alone enables him to disregard the law without any fear of repercussions.
> This alone enables him to disregard the law without any fear of repercussions.
That does not apply to his lackeys though (unless there's a preemptive pardon).
If (!) there's a change in the President eventually, there needs to be a reckoning for everyone that didn't push back on instructions/orders (including all the folks down the line who are blowing up (alleged) drug boats).
Everyone will have preemptive pardons. That has already been guaranteed to them or we wouldn't see so much open lawlessness.
That the president can pardon any criminal providing no justification is preposterous nonsense. Much reform is needed.
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I fear by reducing control over executive power to one, squishy standard like the Intelligible Principle Doctrine will let SCOTUS pick and choose which laws have intelligible principles. When conservatives are in power, suddenly all laws will have them. And swing back when liberals are in control.
> I think the Administration is likely to get its toys taken away soon.
Perhaps worth reading "The umpire who picked a side: John Roberts and the death of rule of law in America":
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/aug/...
Also "John Roberts and the Cynical Cult of Federalist No. 70":
* https://newrepublic.com/article/204334/john-roberts-federali...
And "This Is All John Roberts’ Fault":
* https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/john-roberts-do...
And perhaps "Trump Allies Sue John Roberts To Give White House Control Of Court System":
* https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-allies-sue-john-rob...
Or why bother when no one will stop you from ruling by fiat?
Yes, why would you bother not exercising power you possess?
Yep. I punch literally everyone I meet in the face.
I have the power to do it. Why would I not?
Is assaulting people going further your goals?
Presumably EOs further the President’s goals.
If it does further my goals then it's fine to punch people in the face?
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Do you actually believe this?
Many of those goals are to simply hurt the "wrong" type of people.
“And then the leopards ate my face”
Do you mean “restraint”?
Yes, and..
Each EO tests the waters a bit more with what the public and other branches will tolerate. As we’ve seen with numerous orders already, Congress and business will comply early because they think it will benefit them.
Trump thinks himself a king. He acts like it. He’s attempting to normalize his behavior. He can’t deal with the legislature because it turns out white supremacy isn’t that popular. Who knew?
Apparently popular enough to get him elected. It's not like his supporters were under any pretense who or what they were voting for
I think the GOP, the right, etc. do propaganda very well. And they’re good at spinning scandals into things their voter base wants to hear. Or just burying them in a way that makes it hard for their base to find.
Even the centrist TV networks are still treating Trump like a normal president. News like the NYTimes does the same, while platforming horrible people in their op ed section.
Edit: anec-data - I have an embarrassing number of family members that voted for him. I asked why and the surprising common thing among all of them was they just didn’t know. The felonies, convictions, scandals, the racism and transphobia. They were just surprised. And they’re not very good at thinking critically about much of it.
Instead they’re voting for some nostalgia and the idea that they felt safer and more secure in their country when they were younger.
Ross Douthat makes me (figuratively) vomit every time I read his nonsensical garbage.
I once heard it said that Trump governs like a dictator because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is extremely unpopular and his party holds one of the smallest house majorities ever.
*Extremely unpopular in DC, fwiw
Also a 31% approval rating, unpopular with a large majority of people in the US, fwiw
31% on the economy specifically. Unbelievably (to me), a full 41% of the country still believes he’s doing a good job in general.
GOP is a party captured by the very wealthy. It’s minority rule because of certain elites’ trillion dollar plans to control all three branches of government and the courts have come to fruition after decades in the works.
After Nixon a lot of lessons were learned, on how to handle scandals and how to ram unpopular policy down America’s throat.
There is a very vocal opposition to Trump. However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
It's easy to get caught in an echo chamber of like-minded individuals and assume everyone disagrees with his policies - but that is far from reality.
> he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
Published today: "Trump's approval rating on the economy hits record low 31%"[1]
> President Trump's approval rating on his longtime political calling card — the economy — has sunk to 31%, the lowest it has been across both of his terms as president, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC.
"Trump's Approval Rating Drops to 36%, New Second-Term Low" [2]
> his all-time low was 34% in 2021, at the end of his first term after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The man is only two points above where he was when every reputable institution on the planet was running away from him as fast as possible, and he was nearly convicted in the senate. Less than a year into the term.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/12/12/trump-economy-inflation-aff...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/699221/trump-approval-rating-dr...
So it’s only downhill from here?
Yeah it'd be a wild view to call him among the most popular. But he is actually [0] pretty standard for a modern president - probably the least popular [1] but he doesn't stand out that much among the Bush/Biden/Obama polling except that it appears people understood what he was going to do before he entered office instead of discovering it on the way through.
And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_app...
[1] I'd argue better than that loser Bush who was probably the worst president in modern US history and who's polling showed it, but for the sake of keeping things simple.
> And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.
I think you can go further, the ratings are also heavily tied to things like gasoline prices and the overall economy, and generally things the president has little control over. So actually not much to do with their policies at all. I think Trump knows this and it's why he's done some strategically stupid things to the US fossil fuel industry in order to tactically bring down gasoline prices to juice his ratings.
This likely also explains the 2024 election, because it happened in the context of vast sums of money being sucked out of the economy as the fed tried to fight inflation. Incumbents globally got an absolute thrashing that year regardless of what their actual policies were.
> However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
You might want to look up those data yourself because uh he's actually unpopular in those metrics.
Approval - 42.5% [1]. Much better than Trump's love interest Biden's 37.1% [2] but being below 50% is unpopular.
Popular Vote / Electoral Vote - 49.8%, 312. I may need to tell you this so I will. 50% is greater than 49.8%; a majority of voters (nevermind the country) did not want Trump. As before, this is better than Biden's 306 and Trump1's 304 but worse than Obama2 (332), Obama1 (365) and in general 312 (57%) is nothing to write home about.
[1]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...
[2]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-biden-failed
> It's easy to get caught in an echo chamber
No shit?
Dude, I'm a swing voter and even I can see his popularity ratings are historically low.
Any company dumb enough to try to use this to ignore actual state law will get what they deserve. No state court will give them a pass when they claim an EO has any force of law or that it was reasonable to rely on it.
Even given the current state of things (I’m a lawyer, so well aware) I would put money on this
Like most of what Trump does it's 1000% emo and also very stupid. It's proudly anti-democratic and fundamentally disrespectful of American values.
People fall for it because fear of foreign rivals, frustration with a regulatory patchwork, and anti‑“ideological” backlash make a centralized, tough‑sounding fix emotionally satisfying. Big Tech and national‑security rhetoric also create an illusion that “dominance” equals safety and prosperity, short‑circuiting careful federalism and due process.
A win for states rights!
Just like the last time Trump was president he is far from a traditional conservative regarding small government. People pretend the 2010 tea party is the same thing as Trump as some sort of gotcha, but he's never been that way. He's always been very assertive regarding expanding executive and federal power.
No one is surprised about that guy, those comments usually point out how "the 2010 tea party", and everyone else from the decades, if not centuries, of the conservative milieu, are suddenly all in on this.
The president isnt going to personally enrich himself and his cronies by _divesting_ power from his offce
I agree, the main reason is he has been very effective with his cult of personality to get most of the republican congressmen in line. They lose elections if they don't and politicians aren't known for sticking to their values once in power.
The actual small government republican congressmen like https://x.com/justinamash have been very critical of Trump's power grabs but he lost political favor doing so
meanwhile the url is a different, more direct kind of statement:
eliminating-state-law-obstruction-of-national-artificial-intelligence-policy
And here I thought the GOP was the "states rights" "small gov" party.
It's never been about principles of states rights. It's always about disliking specific national policies and spinning the argument to make it sound as if it's about a reasonable principle.
"State's rights to do what?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZB2ftCl2Vk
Yeah, was thinking the same thing. Reading this:
> State-by-State regulation by definition creates a patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes
Like... isn't that the whole point? Let the states decide?
Federal Preemption: A Legal Primer — https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45825
> shall, in consultation with the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto
It's funny to me that they categorise AI and crypto together like this, two technologies that have nothing to do with each other (other than both being favoured by grifters).
> categorise AI and crypto together like this, two technologies that have nothing to do with each other (other than both being favoured by grifters).
No, they're different in that regard as well; AI actually does have a bit of "there" there.
The regulation vs innovation framing is a false dichotomy here. Most developed economies have found that thoughtful regulation enables _sustainable_ innovation - see GDPR and data privacy innovation, or pharma regulations driving R&D.
For AI specifically, baseline standards around model documentation, data sourcing transparency, and compute auditing would actually help larger players (who can afford compliance) and reduce race-to-bottom dynamics that harm smaller developers.
> Earlier this week, he reiterated that sentiment in a post on Truth Social, saying: “We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors
Has Trump IDed the alleged bad actor states?
It’s the blue ones, of course.
It’s hard to tell if what he says is even relate to what he will do. A hardline on semiconductors to China faded this week when he needed some economic stimulation.
So when states without AI data centers seek to ameliorate tax and zoning obstacles, it won’t be Federal preemption in their way, but what benefits Trump.
True current title: Trump signs executive order aimed at preventing states from regulating AI
In particular, the bulk of the substantial text of the order has a pretty clear culture war bend with all the talk about how truthful AI is. This is in large part a fight over the political leaning of AI models.
National … is it relevant ? And what is the point and why republicans do what the democrats do. Wonder.
> Republicans earlier this year failed to pass a similar 10-year moratorium on state laws that regulate AI as part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with the Senate voting 99-1 to remove that ban from the legislation. Trump’s order resurrects that effort, which failed after bipartisan pushback and Republican infighting, but as an order that lacks the force of law. [0]
> Trump has framed the need for comprehensive AI regulation as both a necessity for the technology’s development and as a means of preventing leftist ideology from infiltrating generative AI – a common conservative grievance among tech leaders such as Elon Musk.
On the other hand ..... Grok and others ...
From the party of "states rights" and "small government"
[0] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/d...
This is hardly readable. What’s this about?
In a parallel universe, the government in the 20th century signed bills protecting tobacco giants from State regulation to encourage investments furthering the country’s international competitiveness in the tobacco industry.
In a parallel universe tobacco is critical to the national security interest of the state. I feel you and other commenters in this thread are ignoring the fact that the outcome of the next war will likely be decided on the cyber front.
I don’t think humanity will survive the next war.
I’m hopeful humanity will, but civilization isn’t making it
That does kind of draw a contrast between Jesse Helms, the ultimate tobacco Senator, and Trump. They’re almost opposites.
More than anything, they need to match and then exceed Singapore's text and data mining exception for copyrighted works. I'll be happy to tell them how since I wrote several versions of it trying to balance all sides.
The minimum, though, is that all copyrighted works the supplier has legal access to can be copied, transformed arbitrarily, and used for training. And they can share those and transformed versions with anyone else who already has legal access to that data. And no contract, including terms of use, can override that. And they can freely scrape it but maybe daily limits imposed to avoid destructive scraping.
That might be enough to collect, preprocess, and share datasets like The Pile, RefinedWeb, uploaded content the host shares (eg The Stack, Youtube). We can do a lot with big models trained that way. We can also synthesize other data from them with less risk.
White House AI czar and Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks elaborated on the rationale for the executive order in a post on X.
Sacks argued that this domain of “interstate commerce” was “the type of economic activity that the Framers of the Constitution intended to reserve for the federal government to regulate.”
At the Oval Office signing ceremony, Sacks said, "We have 50 states running in 50 different directions. It just doesn't make sense."
So much for "states rights" and the "laboratories of democracy."
We had a pretty decisive event eliminating precicely that experiment
Could you be more specific?
He probably means the civil war.
I'd like to point out that the South was only a fan of States Rights exactly insofar as they let them do slavery. The millisecond it came to forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves, they suddenly weren't the same principled supporters of devolving and federating power. Funny how that works.
And just in case it wasn't clear enough already: one of the first acts of the Confederacy was to draft a provisional constitution which explicitly authorized slavery, and which prohibited either Congress or any state from passing laws to the contrary.
States also weren't allow to leave the Confederacy ...
Yeah, I just wanted them to cut out the coy vagueposting and say out loud how bad they think Reconstruction was.
So in that respect, mission accomplished.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment
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Now that’s an excellent piece of latter-day Confederate apologia that I haven’t heard before. The South was basically Gaza. Amazing work.
Wickard v Filburn rearing its ugly ahead again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
Many of the ills currently befalling the US can be traced to the New Deal era. Including, of course, an HN favorite: our system of employer-sponsored health insurance.
I’m not a legal scholar but this seems pretty bone headed.
Which part?
The "The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies." seems like quite the federal overreach never mind the court decision.
Mostly the decision but yeah it’s a double whammy of bad policy from congress and probably worse ruling from the court.
> Sacks argued that this domain of “interstate commerce” was “the type of economic activity that the Framers of the Constitution intended to reserve for the federal government to regulate.”
They did indeed. It’s explicitly delegated to congress which declined to pass a law like this.
The EO is just obviously null and void in the face of any relevant state law.
An EO is not law - the hard part is going to be to get congress onboard. Trump is losing political steam and AI is widely unpopular. Most of this country feels AI is going take their job, poison their children, and increase energy prices.
Right. Congress has the power to preempt state law in an area related to interstate commerce by legislating comprehensive rules. The executive branch does not have the authority to do that by itself.
This is like Trump's "pardon" of someone serving time for a state crime. It does little if anything.
Quite a number of AI-related bills have been introduced in Congress, but very few have made much progress. Search "AI" on congress.gov.
Where do you get this impression? I don’t know anybody who thinks that.
> Trump is losing political steam and AI is widely unpopular.
It seems extremely popular based on my LinkedIn feed! /s
Good thing LinkedIn is such an authentic representation of the vox populi
As expected, the stupidest imaginable policy. Take all the guardrails completely off, even though the ones that are in place are already toothless. Don't worry, the free market will ensure that everything is turned into paperclips at the maximum possible speed.
Let's hope it doesn't get universal
Where this is really going: AI is the boogie man they are going to try to use to infiltrate and take over computing, it's 90s cryptowars 3.0
The pivot will be when they starting talking about AGI and it's dangers and how it must be regulated! (/clutches pearls)... right now they are at the "look at AI we need it it's awesome" stage.
Pure nepotism. Trump also recently softened on cannabis. Who is involved in cannabis (and Adderall) startups? David Sacks, "Crypto and AI czar" and YouTube pundit.
We were promised a better economy, better job chances, and better housing by Mr. Sacks on YouTube.
Instead we get "crypto", "AI" and addictive substance grifting.
Perhaps folks should take some time to realize they've been conned by people whose only interest is their own personal weatlh and power, and will promise anything like "prices are going down day one" or "your income and networth will DOUBLE if you elect me" to get elected.
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I wish this article would include what the details of the framework are. It’s unhelpful in its current form.
We've since changed the URL to link to the order itself, and put links to other articles in the toptext.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239009
We'll merge that thread hither.
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Very welcome order to prevent the anti-AI movement from stymieing the development of AI in the U.S.
Except it does literally nothing since EO can’t preempt state law
It could have some teeth considering that the whole point is the executive office is going to establish a task force that investigates state laws in opposition of this federal deregulation of AI. Any states deemed to be out of sync will have certain kinds of federal funding cut from them.
There are a lot of states, and especially state universities, that will not like that.
The Executive can't actually cut approriated federal funding, since budgets are congress's job.
The executive, in fact, must spend money that congress appropriates. Unless it is illegal/et al to do so, or the funding otherwise allows prseidential discretion, they are required to do so.
Yes, they did some EO's purporting to cut funding. None that related to non-discretionary funding have been upheld, even by "trump" judges, and so far all non-discretionary (IE explicitly directed by congress) funding cut has been restored, AFAIK. All are a wildly clear violation of separation of powers, and so far no judge has disagreed.
(Though don't confuse whether they have to spend the money the way congress directs with whether they can or can't fire federal employees, etc)
There is a path to the president impounding appropriated money through the impoundment control act, but they haven't done it or followed the process so far.