Elon Musk Sells Tucker Carlson His Conservative Vision of Progress

In my opinion, there are a couple of solid takeaways from this description of Musk’s view on society, AI, etc.

1. Progressive used to mean something different than it does now. Progressives (Teddy Roosevelt) used to believe in the power of economic progress as a benefit to society. If business got in the way, then the government needed to step in. Now progressivism is about advancing specific social agendas, and pushing for government social interventions. Musk is a progressive in the former sense.

2. Twitter is perhaps on the way out, but Musk’s view on maximizing free speech is relevant and consistent with his version of progressivism. He explains that the more people can speak their minds, the more likely it is that the best ideas will emerge. He also suggests that it is also likely that this human interaction will be to the benefit of the AI corpus.

I’m not a Musk fan, but I find it difficult to disagree with these points.

The article completely misunderstand the argument, and leaves out the actual important pieces. The argument is that allowing/incentivising some hypothetical AGI to pursue a certain ideology, like trying to inject someone's idea of 'social justice' into the world would pose the risk of allowing this AGI to lie and manipulate humans as subjects and we would lose control. If the incentive is to 'maximally seek truth', then this might be more likely to align with a future that values human life, in the same way that we value animals and appreciate the raw nature, without trying to intervene and change their instinctual behavior. Like trying to biologically modify lions to be vegan, vs. respecting the brutal reality of predator vs. prey. Whether this hypothetical idea is correct or not is debatable, but the article clearly misses the point.

I prefer the actual interview. Very intriguing and entertaining to watch. Not really interested in Politico's left spin on it.