To me the stronger argument about AI is that this revolution won't. And that's because this one is not really about productivity or even about capital investment in things that people nominally would want (faster transport, cheaper cotton, home computers). This one is about ending revolution once and for all; it's not about increeasing the wealth of the wealthy, it's about being the first to arrive at AGI and thus cementing that wealth disparity for all perpetuity. It's the endgame.
I don't know if that's true, but that's to me the argument as to why this one is exceptional and why the capitalist argument for American prosperity is inapplicable in this case.
Just because it can self improve doesn't mean it improves better than everything else or without substantial costs to develop improvement.
Have you ever been to a country where there was extreme poverty?
When people talk about China eliminating extreme poverty, that has a specific international definition. From Wikipedia:
Extreme poverty is the most severe type of poverty, defined by the United Nations (UN) as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services". Historically, other definitions have been proposed within the United Nations.
Extreme poverty mainly refers to an income below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day in 2018 ($2.66 in 2024 dollars), set by the World Bank.[0]
The average homeless person in America spends several times that amount on drugs, and all of the above services are available to them. Homelessness in America is a societal failure, but it does not meet the definition of extreme poverty.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w&pp=ygUMSGFucyByb3N...
Immigration to the USA, both illegal and legal, has cratered.
Here's a UNICEF report comparing childcare policy amongst rich countries: https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/where-do-rich-count...
Sweden ranks third in the comparison metric (what good is free childcare if it is very bad or inaccessible?), and the us ranks 40th out of 41.
Copyright law is another counter-example to your argument. But somehow? that’s no longer a concern if you have enough money. I guess the trick is to steal from literally everyone so that no one entity can claim any measurable portion of the output as damages.
I’ve always thought Copyright should be way shorter than it is, but it’s suspect that we’re having a coming to Jesus moment about IP with all the AI grifting going on.
There are things you can do with technology that are banned as a result of copyright protections, but the underlying technologies are not banned, only the particular use of them is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
Many of those regulations at the federal level, yes?
In addition to ones at state level, yes.
If this had any whiff of actually shedding light on these needed regulations the root OP wouldn't have said what they did. But for now I'm going to head over to Polymarket and see if there are any bets I can place on Trump's kids being appointed to the OpenAI board.
They ALL happened AFTER people got hurt. That's how we do things here. We always have.
It's kind of messed up, but the alternative is a bunch of rules on things that wouldn't be a real problem.
I don’t think I’ve left the scope of this discussion.
I mean the radium fad just by itself was pretty crazy, people used radium suppositories and radium makeup.
With AI, I don’t think there will be a lot of needed regulation until it gets to AI controlling physical machines like self driving cars. But in that respect, we already began regulating before problems appeared.
AI is already hurting people. We need regulation to hold it and its benefactors accountable. The federal government is preempting states from doing so.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgerwp7rdlvo
https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-teen-confided-in-an-ai-c...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/openai-sued-by-7-families-for-all...
https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/chatgpt-murder-suicide-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/tens-thousand...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/17/tech/electricity-bill-price-i...
It was popularized that an estimated 8,000 infant deaths attributed to swill milk occured every year in NYC in the 1850s (take with a grain of salt).
Even more recently much of the banking regulation only occured after severe market issues that broadly impacted the economy.
On a related note: "Layoffs" are going to be a hard practical harm point to rally around. Unless we fundamentally change the nature of our economy (Which doesn't tend to happen until the previous system collapses.), effeciency is king. Tha market isn't rational, but effeciency is a competitive advantage that compounds over time. So you have a prisoners dilemma here. If you want to restrict a technology that boosts efficiency, you either have to close your market and then put up rules that constrain efficiency or you bleed your prosperity.
Where did you get the idea that this was the cause that created millions of jobs and lead to the US running the world's largest economy, and not say - the knock-on effects of the US joining WW2 relatively late and unscathed, making it the only major world power left with a functioning enough industrial complex to export to war-ravaged Europe?
Until that "innovation and disruption" threatens any established player, at which point they run crying to the government to grease some palms. China is innovating and disrupting the entire energy sector via renewables and battery storage while the US is cowering in the corner trying to flaccidly resuscitate the corpse of the coal industry.
Arguably true, but it's also been way ahead of the pack (people tend to forget this) on protection for organized labor, social safety net entitlements, and regulation of harmful industrial safety and environmental externalities.
This statement is awfully one-sided.
Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.