The Agenda

Ordinary people are concerned about big-ticket AI risks, but elites don’t especially care. What’s going on? AI risk is not yet on The Agenda for the Very Serious People.

I think many rationalists working on the issue are surprised that the public is on their side, but huge sections of the elite are not. Anyone who has fought a political battle against elites is not surprised. Elites in our society are picked based on conformity to a fairly narrow band of ideas that are, to a shocking degree self-sustaining. The ruling ideology of government and senior people in Very Serious media. I call this collection of ideas The Agenda. Elites are fanatically loyal to The Agenda in a way that is hard to convey to someone who hasn’t encountered them while working at cross purposes to The Agenda. Ordinary people, despite the many failings of the human condition, are at least at liberty to reason and imagine broadly. At the extreme, one finds people who cannot imagine alternatives anymore- you probably recall Mark Fisher saying that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, well for some of these people it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a break with the Bipartisan Foreign Policy Consensus.

The Agenda is not Neoliberalism, though it contains neoliberal elements, it also contains elements that would make a neoliberal pull their hair out. While Neoliberalism was active, the agenda is largely sedentary, even while it tries to project the aura of frantic activity. While Neoliberalism was responsive to (enormously destructive) ideas, the agenda, to the extent it responds to anything at all, is responsive to catchphrases. Perhaps it is what remains after Neoliberalism has washed over everything and then receded like a tide running out of energy.

The Agenda is an ideology that is unlike any other in the world. For example, people without an economics background sometimes call the agenda “economic rationalism”, assuming that it is the ideas pushed by the economics profession, but this is wrong because conventional economics disagrees with much of it. For example, it is incoherent to support means testing but seek to reduce the progressivity of the tax system. Means testing is an effective increase to the progressivity of the tax system.

Sometimes The Agenda ideology is equated with the interests of capital, but this is wrong. Certainly, as a Marxist, I believe that the needs of capital do ultimately delimit what can and can’t be on The Agenda, but the Agenda has a fair degree of independence. For example, in Australia, capital made it quite clear that the low rate of unemployment payments had become a problem for it. Both parties ignored them because raising welfare payments was not on the Agenda.

More than anything else I am shocked by the sincerity of its believers. I remember as a student in Australia trying to reignite a movement for free education. A piece was written mocking the idea at a major publication, and the thrust of it was don’t be ridiculous, free education isn’t on The Agenda. The idea of engaging with the merits was off the table because we don’t talk seriously about things that are not on The Agenda. It is hard to find anyone with more conventional religious beliefs who takes them that seriously these days.

There is no brief way to convey the content of the agenda. Key features include:

1. A great reluctance to “throw money at things” in a simple, direct way combined, paradoxically, with a great willingness to spend enormous amounts of money in “smart, targeted” ways that end up a crisscrossing mess.

2. Measures should be not too simple (that’s gauche) but often also not too complex (that’s dorky and thus also gauche).

3. An overwhelming, contentless devotion to education as the solution to all ills. This is one of the few areas where The Agenda overlaps with popular opinion. There is little empirical support for this approach as e.g. Freddie de Boer has written.

4. A belief that things only become ‘real’ when other members of the club say them.

5. Overwhelming disgust at any suggestion that serious public debate about foreign policy is legitimate in a democracy.

Some of it, I think, is pure contingency and path dependency- ideas still fashionable because they were fashionable in the past for a reason now lost. But if I had to find The Agenda’s key identifying mark it would be this. A deep desire to do something big and make a mark but in a way that doesn’t cause a change in things that adversely affects anyone, anyone at all, who holds real power. Something with grandeur before the elites yet wholly inoffensive to all the elites. This is perhaps the closest I can find to the core of The Agenda. Of course, in practice, some elites will be ticked off, but to do something big that no one who matters dislikes is the highest aspiration.

The general aversion to upsetting big players makes action on AI difficult. But the feature that it is most relevant in relation to AI is that while The Agenda makes constant reference to the future, it changes very slowly.

It’s worth noting that a certain kind of journalist is even more committed to the agenda than politicians per se.

Although describing the agenda is difficult, I can tell you exactly how it comes to be. It is what remains when there is too little ichor in the veins of the political body, and hence politics settles into an equilibrium, yet there is still a political class eager to be seen to be doing something. It is what you get when mass politics has dried up, but a self-appointed class of caretakers still feel the need to sing for their bread.

The United States is unique in the Anglo world in virtue of being the only place where either side is free, even partially, from the agenda. But- and here the monkey paw curls- it broke free by way of Trumpism. It has fashioned itself into something worse.

If there is a desire to get The Agenda onside with stopping an AI apocalypse, the best advice I can give is to find people who are part of the clique but concerned about AI and get them to speak out about it.

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