Near the end, Ezra Klein and Slobodian were discussing how to contain Elon Musk's power. Slobodian picks up Musk's line from an Economist interview that AI can't be stopped, and argues that local data-center moratoria show the pace of AI is a choice.
…units was actually much more socially useful and potentially inspiring than what he has done with his businesses ever since. So I think that one attitude there is to start from first principles and just say, like, what are we even, you know, investing in any of this for in the first place? What
do we want? What
…impossible not to ask, right? Because if the answer to that question is what we want is continued level of being completely fused with this. Man, then I think a lot of people on reflection would not want that. So he's made us ask that question. And he knows that he's put himself into a kind of a difficult situation with people asking that question, hence the impression of inevitability. So in the economist interview, he said, it's not like we can stop AI right now. There's no red button that says stop. Actually, of course there is, right? Generative AI on its current model requires enormous amount of build out of compute infrastructure that actually right now is being slowed down to the point of even stopping through hundreds of moratoria across the country. So it's actually not true that there's inevitability to the world that he's imagining. It actually is true that we have options and breaking out of that kind of cosmic vector that he's produced through the uses of the attention economy is the first step in that. But I think it gets even more pragmatic than that. I'll give you an example. On his newsletter this week, Paul Krugman, centrist liberal economist, has talked in two segments about nationalizing Starlink. Paul's
only a centrist to you.
But this is actually not something that you would have expected him to talk about a few years ago, right? I mean, the use of the Defense Production Act, the comparisons to the nationalization of Montgomery Ward. A pragmatic economist until recently would have said, if you nationalize a company…
incentives for future companies to build this kind of capacity.