Jake: The suddenness of AI doomerism is suspicious

Last week at this time, I was thinking about the Seahawks opener against the Patriots (thank the Lord for the “W”) and getting three of my four boys back into the school routine — a development my wife is thrilled about.

What wasn’t on my radar? That AI is now, apparently, an existential threat to humanity, and that only aggressive government regulation stands between us and extinction. Feels more like a movie plot than reality.

But somehow, almost overnight, the doomerism arrived, and with it, calls for an international regulatory body to rein in this “new frontier.” Barack Obama is telling Democrats to make AI regulation central to their midterm pitch. Kamala Harris is calling for intervention. So is Hillary Clinton. So is King Charles.

Even the tech CEOs building this stuff can’t agree. Anthropic and OpenAI want more regulation (why don’t they self-regulate?), while Elon Musk wants some guardrails, but not enough to choke innovation. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang isn’t buying any of it; he’s called the whole doom narrative a “hoax,” dismissing the whistleblower behind it (a former Anthropic researcher who’d been there only a couple of months before predicting a greater than 10% extinction risk from AI) as “made up” and “irresponsible.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist from Seattle predicted this playbook 55 years ago

For those of us on the outside, figuring out who to believe is genuinely hard. A little caution never hurts. But when Bernie Sanders, 85 years old, is suddenly a thought leader on artificial intelligence, forgive me for getting a little cynical.

Here’s what this looks like to me:

First, it’s not exactly a coincidence that this is erupting less than 50 days before hotly contested midterms, pushed hardest by the party out of power, framed as an emergency that must be solved right now. That’s not a scientific timeline. That’s a political one.

Second, and this is the part more people should know, a Nobel Prize-winning economist named George Stigler from right here in Seattle laid out a theory all the way back in 1971 that explains a lot of this. His “Theory of Economic Regulation” argued that industries often chase regulation not to protect the public, but to protect themselves. Big players use government power to lock in subsidies, box out competitors, and cement their own dominance before upstarts can catch up.

I’m no expert. Maybe the doomers turn out to be right. But I doubt it. America has always been the place that runs toward the unknown frontier, not away from it. We’ve conquered every one before. I’m not ready to bet against us doing it again, even with AI.

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