I was not happy voting for Kamala Harris in 2024, but I certainly wasn’t going to vote for Donld Trump. He’s turned out to be worse than I’d feared. Though we have no way of knowing, I can’t imagine that Kamala Harris would have been worse. I’m pretty sure that she would have been better for one, for two terms. Beyond that? Who knows?
It has been clear to me for some time, say two decades, that the institutional structure by which the world has been organized for the century and a half, that organizational structure is fraying badly. Our institutions aren’t working very well. One consequence: A large number of Americans were willing to elect an obviously deeply flawed and corrupt man to the presidency, Donald J. Trump. I cannot imagine that eight year of Kamala Harris would have changed that significantly. Whatever the source of the desperate displeasure in the electorate, that will still remain in force.
Now we have AI. There is no way we can predict how that will unfold. The only thing we can be sure of is that it will be deeply disruptive. Job loss, a collapse of an over-inflated stock market, who knows? Had Harris been elected this would still have happened. Perhaps a Harris administration would have been more inclined to regulate AI, but I cannot imagine that the effects would have been any more than marginal. AI technology will be fundamentally disruptive in the short and into the mid-term, though it may prove enormously positive in the long term. But we have to get there.
AI, and the internet before it, is emerging in the consequence of an increasingly obsolete institutional regime, an obsolescence that the technology will intensify. What kind of institutions would we have if they had originated in the context of the technology we now have, and that is emerging? That’s where we need to go? How do we get there? In the context of that question it is by no means obvious that a Kamala Harris administration would have been better than the Trump administration is proving to be.
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