Should the United States Pause AI?

Peter Thiel says the United States should not pause AI. He is not in the pause camp, and he says the country needs to hit the accelerator as hard as possible.

He broadly agrees with David Sacks and President Trump that competition with China means stop talking about a pause, even if AI could be an existential threat. You have to develop the AI technology in order to control it, so if China develops the same tools, staying ahead is more imperative than ever. He worries about a high-tech totalitarianism being tried in China. It is not as violent as Stalin, Mao, or Hitler, because you do not need to kill as many people, but it knows more about you than you know about yourself, and he does not want that model to win.

He also refuses a pause because a middle-class society is one where people expect their kids to do better than they did, and that expectation has been fraying for millennials and, to some extent, Gen Z. He does not know whether AI can bring it back. If the United States had outlawed the internet and now outlawed AI, he says there would be virtually no growth, and the country would look more like Europe or Japan, a nastier zero-sum society with a loser for every winner.