Rafe Fletcher: Broad-church Conservatism can’t handle AI
Are they actually going to vote on something real?
Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG.
Dario Amodei kickstarted the recent peak in AI hype with a 20,000-word essay on the technology’s imminent dangers.
Released just as his company Anthropic (which counts Rishi Sunak amongst its advisers) embarked on a new US$30 billion funding round, cynics may infer ulterior motives in Amodei’s elucidation of AI’s awesome powers. Nevertheless, its renewed prominence leaves governments responding to an age-old question: how to harness technological revolutions while limiting societal disruption?
The subject was top of the agenda in Singapore as Prime Minister Lawrence Wong presented the country’s budget last Thursday. New policies include generous tax deductions for businesses’ AI expenditures and free access to premium AI tools for Singaporeans who take up certain AI training courses. “AI is a powerful tool”, said Wong, but “it must serve our national interests and our people.”
In Singapore, capitalism and its innovations have always been a means, not an end. Something that was sometimes misunderstood by British Brexiteers imagining Singapore-on-Thames as bastion of laissez-faire economics. The better analogy is Vote Leave’s own Take Back Control when it comes to market forces. Use them but steer them.
The problem is that Britain lacks this same autonomy. The Conservatives share the blame for that. Tension between its strands of economic liberalism and paternalism manifest in strategic incoherence. That split was always present but more easily reconciled when Britain was a leading power. Perhaps the closest historical parallel to AI disruption, the Industrial Revolution, illustrates this.
Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book The Great Transformation is an account of Britain’s pioneering capitalism in the 19th Century. Polanyi was a Hungarian Jew who first fled from Budapest in 1919, then Vienna in 1933, following the respective ascension of fascist regimes. He argues free markets underpinned this terror, a result of trying to square the subsequent disorder. Polanyi’s own moderate socialism looks a tad naïve given the authoritarianism he witnessed first-hand. Particularly his belief that we can trust an interventionist government if it is “true to its task of creating more abundant freedom for all.”
But an errant prognosis does not diminish what Polanyi gets right. Chiefly that the market forces guiding the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s economic supremacy were not entirely organic. Britain’s rise rested not only on technology but government decisions about trade, finance and property. Empire and global reserve currency status meant Britain naturally absorbed the advantages of a new free-market structure.
Domestic politics then debated the balance between accelerationism and gradualism. Polanyi’s own belief that …
Are they actually going to vote on something real?
Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG.
Dario Amodei kickstarted the recent peak in AI hype with a 20,000-word essay on the technology’s imminent dangers.
Released just as his company Anthropic (which counts Rishi Sunak amongst its advisers) embarked on a new US$30 billion funding round, cynics may infer ulterior motives in Amodei’s elucidation of AI’s awesome powers. Nevertheless, its renewed prominence leaves governments responding to an age-old question: how to harness technological revolutions while limiting societal disruption?
The subject was top of the agenda in Singapore as Prime Minister Lawrence Wong presented the country’s budget last Thursday. New policies include generous tax deductions for businesses’ AI expenditures and free access to premium AI tools for Singaporeans who take up certain AI training courses. “AI is a powerful tool”, said Wong, but “it must serve our national interests and our people.”
In Singapore, capitalism and its innovations have always been a means, not an end. Something that was sometimes misunderstood by British Brexiteers imagining Singapore-on-Thames as bastion of laissez-faire economics. The better analogy is Vote Leave’s own Take Back Control when it comes to market forces. Use them but steer them.
The problem is that Britain lacks this same autonomy. The Conservatives share the blame for that. Tension between its strands of economic liberalism and paternalism manifest in strategic incoherence. That split was always present but more easily reconciled when Britain was a leading power. Perhaps the closest historical parallel to AI disruption, the Industrial Revolution, illustrates this.
Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book The Great Transformation is an account of Britain’s pioneering capitalism in the 19th Century. Polanyi was a Hungarian Jew who first fled from Budapest in 1919, then Vienna in 1933, following the respective ascension of fascist regimes. He argues free markets underpinned this terror, a result of trying to square the subsequent disorder. Polanyi’s own moderate socialism looks a tad naïve given the authoritarianism he witnessed first-hand. Particularly his belief that we can trust an interventionist government if it is “true to its task of creating more abundant freedom for all.”
But an errant prognosis does not diminish what Polanyi gets right. Chiefly that the market forces guiding the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s economic supremacy were not entirely organic. Britain’s rise rested not only on technology but government decisions about trade, finance and property. Empire and global reserve currency status meant Britain naturally absorbed the advantages of a new free-market structure.
Domestic politics then debated the balance between accelerationism and gradualism. Polanyi’s own belief that …
Rafe Fletcher: Broad-church Conservatism can’t handle AI
Are they actually going to vote on something real?
Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG.
Dario Amodei kickstarted the recent peak in AI hype with a 20,000-word essay on the technology’s imminent dangers.
Released just as his company Anthropic (which counts Rishi Sunak amongst its advisers) embarked on a new US$30 billion funding round, cynics may infer ulterior motives in Amodei’s elucidation of AI’s awesome powers. Nevertheless, its renewed prominence leaves governments responding to an age-old question: how to harness technological revolutions while limiting societal disruption?
The subject was top of the agenda in Singapore as Prime Minister Lawrence Wong presented the country’s budget last Thursday. New policies include generous tax deductions for businesses’ AI expenditures and free access to premium AI tools for Singaporeans who take up certain AI training courses. “AI is a powerful tool”, said Wong, but “it must serve our national interests and our people.”
In Singapore, capitalism and its innovations have always been a means, not an end. Something that was sometimes misunderstood by British Brexiteers imagining Singapore-on-Thames as bastion of laissez-faire economics. The better analogy is Vote Leave’s own Take Back Control when it comes to market forces. Use them but steer them.
The problem is that Britain lacks this same autonomy. The Conservatives share the blame for that. Tension between its strands of economic liberalism and paternalism manifest in strategic incoherence. That split was always present but more easily reconciled when Britain was a leading power. Perhaps the closest historical parallel to AI disruption, the Industrial Revolution, illustrates this.
Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book The Great Transformation is an account of Britain’s pioneering capitalism in the 19th Century. Polanyi was a Hungarian Jew who first fled from Budapest in 1919, then Vienna in 1933, following the respective ascension of fascist regimes. He argues free markets underpinned this terror, a result of trying to square the subsequent disorder. Polanyi’s own moderate socialism looks a tad naïve given the authoritarianism he witnessed first-hand. Particularly his belief that we can trust an interventionist government if it is “true to its task of creating more abundant freedom for all.”
But an errant prognosis does not diminish what Polanyi gets right. Chiefly that the market forces guiding the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s economic supremacy were not entirely organic. Britain’s rise rested not only on technology but government decisions about trade, finance and property. Empire and global reserve currency status meant Britain naturally absorbed the advantages of a new free-market structure.
Domestic politics then debated the balance between accelerationism and gradualism. Polanyi’s own belief that …
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