A lot of people are scared shitless by the prospect of artificial intelligence at best taking a lot of people’s jobs and at worst wiping humanity off the face of the earth. These are not simply the fears of technophobes or nonagenarians resistant to change but the actual individuals running the largest AI companies in the world, several of whom sounded the alarm last week and urged the government to enforce a slowdown of AI development among other guardrails.

Unfortunately for humanity, one of the few people who could be helpful here, by virtue of his position as the leader of the Free World, seems to believe AI poses zero risks whatsoever and that anyone claiming otherwise is a conspiracy theorist and/or double agent working for China. That person is Donald Trump, who recently said AI can be used for “a lot of things” without specifying how he’s done so. And now, according to a new report, his insistence that AI is nothing to be concerned about is in spite of White House aides urging him to buy at least a fraction of a clue.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the president’s “own aides have had little luck convincing him that AI has significant downsides,” according to people familiar with the matter. At least two of those aides are chief of staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, both of whom were “caught off guard and unhappy” after venture capitalist and White House AI adviser David Sacks got Trump to nix an executive order that would have imposed government review of AI models. (Sacks, whose firm’s investments include stakes in SpaceX and other AI companies, apparently got the president to scrap the order in a “last minute” phone call.) While Wiles and Bessent were ultimately able to........

© Daily Intelligencer