Why I'm Happy the US Government BANNED Claude Fable — "AI in the AM" Livestream with Nathan Labenz

The US government banned Claude Fable like a clown show. But I’m happy about it. Here’s my appearance on the AI in the AM livestream (recorded Tue, June 16) with Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan, where I explain why this was good for society. The government’s action shows that we can actually pause AI, a precedent that matters way more than the boneheaded rationale behind Fable’s ban.We then get into a mini-AI doom debate where Prakash defends the AI optimist’s worldview. I push back on how much I expect superintelligence to reshape the planet.Timestamps00:00:00 — Why I’m Happy the Government Banned Fable00:11:18 — Why We Lose Control of AI00:20:27 — The Icarus Graph: Heaven, Then Hell00:22:33 — Get Ready to Pause00:25:51 — What Exactly Should We Ban?00:27:42 — Wrapping UpLinksThe Cognitive Revolution podcast with Nathan Labenz —https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/Nathan Labenz on X — https://x.com/labenzPrakash Narayanan on X — https://x.com/8teapi AI in the AM on X — https://x.com/AI_in_the_AM TranscriptWhy I’m Happy the Government Banned FableNathan Labenz 00:00:08On that note, perhaps a fitting transition to our first guest of the day. Liron Shapira is the host of Doom Debates, a YouTube channel where he has found quite a bit of success in bringing people from really all walks of life on to discuss how scared we should be of AI and just how high our P(Doom)s should be.So Liron, I’m excited to get your take on recent events. Obviously, never a dull moment in the AI space. The thing that caught my eye most from you over the last few days was when you said basically, “I want the government to be willing to take action on AI issues so badly that even if this whole Fable ban turns out to be totally boneheaded and unjustified in some local sense, you support it, or you’re at least happy to see it because it breaks the ice and now nobody can ever tell you again that it’s impossible to imagine the government doing anything.” So give me the double click into that story, and then I’m sure we’ll have plenty of interesting directions to go.Liron Shapira 00:01:17Hey, Nate. Great to be here. That’s exactly right. I’m a simple man. I see AI getting paused. I feel good about breaking the Overton window. The government can do it. It’s that easy, guys. This is a precedent. Overall, I’m happy. You can talk about the nuances. It was done like a clown show. It was done for bad motives. It doesn’t really consider China or a treaty or anything. There’s a lot of problems, but I’m really happy about smashing the Overton window, where now tech folks don’t think that they’re in a bubble or they’re untouchable. It happened, guys. And we can only go from here.Prakash Narayanan 00:01:53I actually agree with you, because I think it was a little bit delusional for tech to feel that it wasn’t gonna get touched. And the government just has so many small and large ways to effectuate its power. So it was not that surprising to me that they kind of went through left field and went with the export control rather than anything else.But it also strikes me that as they exercise this, we start also to go into kind of what we wanted to avoid. It’s a little bit of a small tyranny. I think several people on the timeline have commented, Dean Ball has commented, this kind of unstructured regulation looks kind of selective and vengeful almost, and it starts putting you in this zone where tech people start to mistrust the government because you also see — I think there’s a lot of narratives on the timeline which are being leaked, “sources close to,” “sources familiar with,” and as they get leaked, it’s not very certain whether those things actually happened. Would someone actually attest to that in front of Congress? Very unclear.And we’ve also seen this kind of behavior from the administration in other affairs as well, where you have multiple conflicting narratives. It’s happening with the Iran war right now, where it’s not even clear to Congress what the deal is. You have different people saying the deal is a different thing.Prakash 00:03:46So where do you think that puts us?Prakash 00:03:49It’s great that it’s happening. I understand you feel it’s great that it’s happening to AI right now, but does that put us in a position where it’s detrimental to the body public at large?Liron 00:04:03Well, I think your analysis — you’re weaving together a few factors, but I think the elephant in the room, I hat