Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD
4 hours ago
Monty Python sketch:
"You, sir, are a duck."
"Classically, that would not be the case, my dear fellow. A classic duck would walk like a duck and talk like a duck. I regret to inform you that I do neither."
"Ah! A classic duck, you say? Well, that’s an entirely different bird, sir. Entirely different."
* * *
"AI politics is now loud–precisely the environment in which Culpepper predicts business power will be weakest. A mature industry can bend regulation to its purposes through revolving doors, longstanding relationships and obscure rulemaking. An industry under Sauron’s eye has much less power and faces much greater risk that politics will bend regulation to its purposes. Political actors are eager for an excuse to redistribute AI rents away from capitalists and toward favored groups..."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...
This blogpost was written by a big-shot economist btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Tabarrok
Usually he blogs from a libertarian point of view, so you would expect him to be fairly vigorous about denouncing regulatory capture, if that was truly the story here.
It sounds to me like he wants you to believe the effective way to lobby for a ban on open source A.I. development is to use the same "classic" methods that someone in the 1950s used to lobby for coffee beans.
Therefore, as they are not acting like 1950s coffee bean sellers, they can't be doing regulatory capture.
That's the only possibly explanation why they don't lobby like coffee bean sellers.
These industries and eras are completely interchangeable.
You're failing to understand the argument. The argument is about the balance of incentives facing politicians / regulators.
Or you failed to understand how the blog post using the eye of Sauron metaphor was cartoonishly misunderstanding the world we live in. Who can say?
> Political actors are eager for an excuse to redistribute AI rents away from capitalists and toward favored groups...
The current "favored group" is big-tech moguls, though. Just because the industry is new doesn't mean the people investing in it are newcomers.