The Alliance for the Future Manifesto
The Dawn of a New Political Force
AI will give us back our future. We’re here to defend it.
Alliance for the Future is a new Washington D.C. based nonprofit organization. We’re a coalition of entrepreneurs, technologists, and policy experts who believe that artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better. We have banded together to oppose the escalating panic around AI.
AFTF will work to inform the media, lawmakers, and other interested parties about the incredible benefits AI can bring to humanity. We will oppose stagnation and advocate for the benefits of technological progress in the political arena.
For decades, stagnation has been the root cause of our greatest national problems: the loss of the American dream for the normal person and the spiteful, zero-sum thinking which dominates politics.
Artificial intelligence is here to reverse this trend. It is here to give us back our future.
As Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen puts it,
Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.
Progress in AI is far from a done deal. It is still in a research and development phase, and only just beginning to be adopted by industry. We face a well-funded opposition that is willing and able to strangle AI in its crib or limit its availability to a small number of well-connected elites.
Per venture capitalist Peter Thiel:
The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.
Escalating panic and reckless regulation around artificial intelligence will cause more harm than benefit. AFTF was founded to be the voice of ordinary users, builders, and founders, who want the basic freedom to use machine learning in their day to day lives.
The Coming Overreach
Highly-motivated, well-funded activists have called for the implementation of dystopian measures to slow or stop the development of AI. They have proposed:
While these claims seem absurd, they come from established research centers, universities, and think tanks, with billions of dollars in backing and connections to the halls of power in Washington, London, Brussels, and elsewhere.
Every age has its techno-nihilists — those who focus exclusively on fears of technology, while ignoring its real benefits. There were people who wanted to stop electricity, the car, the airplane, vaccines, and computers. Now, there are people who want to stop machine learning.
Everything from the food we eat to your ability to read this sentence is because society has triumphed over fearmongers. But the story doesn’t always end this way. Dozens of technologies we hold dear are banned in more authoritarian societies. Even in the United States, transformative technologies such as nuclear energy are banned as a policy choice.
Governing Philosophy
We’ve seen this story across history – legacy players try to regulate their newer competition out of existence. We oppose all forms of regulatory capture – the establishment of new agencies, organizations, and licensing schemes to lock out competitors. We believe in regulation with a scalpel, not a hammer. What techno-pessimists have proposed is closer to regulation with a wrecking ball.
Like every technology, there are negative uses of AI. What if someone uses AI for child pornography, identity theft, or fraud? This question has been asked throughout history. The same question can be asked for cars, electricity, the printing press, and certainly the internet.
Throughout history, we have always solved this problem the same way: by banning the negative action, not the technology itself. Child pornography, identity theft, or fraud should be illegal, regardless of what technologies criminals use.
What you are protected from today, you will be protected from in the future. What you are free to do today, you will be free to do faster and better tomorrow.
We believe in a positive vision for AI policy. Within the government itself, AI can be used to modernize public service, defend our country from cyberattacks, collect nuanced public feedback, enable new scientific discoveries, and accelerate the approval of infrastructure projects.
It’s far easier to be proactive than reactive. Once the crackdown begins, like with nuclear energy, it becomes much harder to undo.
Defending your ability to use AI must start now.
AI will be a process in every part of the economy
Politicians and regulators fundamentally misunderstand AI as a category.
Artificial intelligence is a process, not an object. It is not oil, shovels, or images. It is more like mathematical equations, programming languages, or speech. Artificial intelligence is a set of statistical methods used to turn information and energy into output, like new images or emails. It is a wide research area that includes simple methods a single software engineer could manually write in one night and billion-dollar models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Regulating or licensing “artificial intelligence” is like regulating statistics or economics. It would be the equivalent of assigning government bureaucrats to go into each and every company where AI is used (virtually all of them within decades) and micromanaging what software they can download, what mathematical formulas they could write down, or what emails they could send. In other words, it is completely infeasible.
As Jim Pethokoukis put it, “If AI is used across the whole economy, then having a department manage AI is like having a department manage the economy”.
In the past, a targeted, consequence-based approach has been extremely successful. If a person writes software in the C++ programming language to hack or defraud another, that person is punished. There is no collective punishment doled out to every C++ programmer or the inventors of the C++ language. If a person uses email to scam another, that person is punished, not the email server or protocol inventor.
The intuitive reaction to these statements is “of course, it would be devastating to punish programmers or email users as a whole”. It’s also the morally good approach in the tradition of American justice: punishing culpable individuals rather than collective groups.
National Security Needs a Strong Private Sector
Nationality security is impossible without technological supremacy. America is never more than a decade away from losing that technological race to our adversaries.
The American way is twofold:
A public sector which understands the path to strength is through a free and open private sector
A private sector with the civic responsibility to protect the safety of their countrymen
We work to encourage both these mindsets in lawmakers and founders alike.
Throughout history, strategic technologies often have both military and civilian uses. We won the Second World War, the cold war, and countless other conflicts by accelerating these technologies, not restricting them.
These ‘dual-use’ technologies are ones we are already comfortable using in everyday life. A transmitter on a phone or laptop is little different than one on a remote bomb. The wires, microchips, and batteries are only slight variations of each other. Cars, planes, and ships all have vast uses in military conflict, but are all crucial to the way of life of every American.
Machine learning comes in a long line of technologies that drastically improves civilian and military effectiveness. This is why policies restricting “dual-use” machine learning models will cost not just dollars, but American lives.
For centuries, free and open civilian research and entrepreneurship has enabled more efficient production, research, and leadership in the military. The accumulated knowledge, organizational processes, and practical training of American civilians gained from the private sector enables efficient and effective military development. This is why policy must encourage positive collaboation with developers, engineers, and entrepreneurs.
AI is the Free Speech Issue of the Decade
Recent scandals at Google shows that government policy is inflicting extreme political biases upon the most important technological developments in AI.
From a Pirate Wires exclusive:
“Three entire models all kind of designed for adding diversity,” I asked one person close to the safety architecture. “It seems like that — diversity — is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?”
“Yes,” he said, “we spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.”
Google’s Gemini paper directly references the Biden Executive Order on AI as motivating its content policies:
External groups were selected based on their expertise across a range of domain areas, including those outlined within the White House Commitments, the U.S. Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, and the Bletchley Declaration
AI will go much further than social media. Firstly, it will be used in almost all social media. Free speech in social media will depend on free speech with AI. Secondly, it will be involved in economic processes far more wide-ranging than social media. It is a process used not just ubiquitously for communication, but for scientific research, manufacturing, logistics, defense, and much more.
Creating an open and dynamic environment for AI not only involves preventing further damage, but curtailing existing destructive measures. This calls for a threefold approach to AI:
Ensuing the open development of competitors
Curtailing the weaponization of existing laws against heterodox AI companies
Defending against laws which will give censorship powers to the executive branch
Why Open Source Is Vital
Machine learning is a classic example of upfront research and development costs. It can cost tens of millions of dollars in hardware alone to train a large language model, in this case LLAMA-2. Once this model is trained, it can be adapted for a variety of purposes. Incentivizing open-source development increases efficiency in training by reducing double-spending. It lowers the barrier of entry for talented engineers without independent wealth or institutional affiliation. By making software open to public scrutiny, it makes fixing security issues and preventing unintended behavior far easier. Consequently, proactively funding open-source organizations and incentivizing existing AI organizations to open-source models benefits everyone.
Competition and open source incentivize the creation of a plurality of ideologically diverse machine learning models. As “Godfather of AI” Yann LeCun put it,
We cannot afford those systems to come from a handful of companies on the West coast of the US. Those systems will constitute the repository of all human knowledge. And we cannot have that be controlled by a small number of people. It has to be diverse, for the same reason the press has to be diverse.
AI Will Encourage Healthy Work
Conservatives often assume that automation will only eliminate jobs that give workers a sense of meaning. As the story goes, the blue-collar embodied work that made red America was automated or shipped overseas, and what replaced it was soul-destroying office jobs. Looking at the past twenty years, there’s reason to believe this story. Manufacturing has indeed declined. Office work has indeed exploded. There is a vitality of physical work that is missing, with many scrambling to replace it with weightlifting and supplements.
Extend the history lesson to 100, 200, or 2000 years. Does this story still hold? The factory jobs conservatives miss were themselves the product of new technologies. They replaced some of the most unhealthy, self-destructive work in American history, such as deadly, poorly paid mining jobs. The 1950s, single-income family doesn’t just vanish if you look 30 years later, but also if you look 30 years prior.
It was enabled by new technologies: efficient construction of new homes, widespread adoption of cars enabling life in the suburbs, and the modern manufacturing systems which those jobs depended on. The same is true across centuries and millenia. Hobbes rightly described pre-civilizational life as “nasty, brutish and short”. Technology eliminated jobs deadlier than warzones in favor of the American way of life conservatives now reminisce over.
Artificial intelligence will follow this broader historical trend. The last 20 years of automation were a historical anomaly.
For example, large language models such as ChatGPT are best at filling repetitive, routine paperwork. It takes away work that no one wants to do — tax filings, HR compliance, call centers, and other soulless corporate busywork. In the same way that technology brought about the work many conservatives recall fondly, the current wave of technology directly targets the work they excoriate. I would urge all conservatives not to let the post 1950s narrative get in the way of a future that is not only more prosperous, but more vitally human.
Call to Action
Now is the moment that AI is defined in the minds of both the public and of legislators. While the benefits of AI might be clear to those who understand it, the same cannot be said for everyone. Sensationalism and risk-aversion could easily lead to the most important technologies of this century being set back decades.
Alliance for the Future is in a position to do something unique – set terms that are beneficial to the AI industry at large, not just to a few companies or interest groups. We seek to overcome this period of stagnation and bitter politics. The American people are hungry for a courageous, free, and optimistic approach to technology.
The best way to make this goal a reality is to donate to Alliance for the Future, a 501(c)4. You can also contact us.
Excellent work, thank goodness someone is doing it. I just wish Europe had a few Brian Chaus.
Great stuff, Brian. Time to accelerate. I will be in DC in April and would be great to attend some kind of AFTF meetup.