Going into this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the White House’s top science and technology adviser, Michael Kratsios, signaled some chilly conversations with European leaders may lie ahead on the topic of artificial intelligence and the way it is regulated.
“I will continue to point out to my tech minister counterparts the ways they can create a regulatory environment to allow AI to thrive,” Kratsios told NBC News, “to make sure they’re not getting ahead of themselves with overburdening regulations, like the EU AI Act, which are an absolute disaster.” For Kratsios, the Trump administration’s light-touch approach to AI regulation is the winning formula.
"There’s been an A-B test for decades on how you lead in technology, and it’s very obvious what the recipe is,” said Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and one of the nation’s leading artificial intelligence advisers.
From a quick reading of the actual law, here are some of the AI uses it prohibits that will apparently “stifle innovation”:
…use of an AI system that exploits any of the vulnerabilities of a natural person or a specific group of persons due to their age, disability or a specific social or economic situation
…to assess or predict the risk of a natural person committing a criminal offence, based solely on the profiling of a natural person or on assessing their personality traits and characteristics
…the use of an AI system that deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness or purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques
…the use of AI systems that create or expand facial recognition databases through the untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage
…the use of biometric categorisation systems that categorise individually natural persons based on their biometric data to deduce or infer their race, political opinions, trade union membership, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation
Me at a congress about technology and medicine.
Presentation about future of AI in medicine.
The speaker that current Europea blocks progress
The laws? GDPR, medical data protection, and privacy.
In that congress there were two sides on AI in healthcare, one making emphasis on improving care and outcomes and huge emphasis on privacy and security, and the other envisioned a Medical Minority Report/Big Brother-like future where there is zero human connection with the patient.
Yeah it’s pretty much a guarantee that when you hear an oligarch saying regulations cause stagnation or stifle innovation, they’re referring to protections that are meant to keep people from being exploited.
They will then claim that U.S. values are “baked in” to their bullshit and that’s why you don’t need regulations… These are also the people that are destroying the U.S. and have openly stated they are trying to destroy democracy
For example, Kratsios, the man who argues against regulations for technology, was tasked with using cutting edge technology to prevent COVID from spreading as well as for keeping COVID misinformation from being shared on social media.
We know that he failed to do both.
Best case scenario, he has never known what the fuck he was doing, millions died under his watch, and this is a very clear example of why nobody should be listening to him.
Worst case scenario, his team of tech bros who were supposed to be keeping disinformation from spreading, either created (or intentionally allowed it to be spread) the online misinformation that plagued the U.S. regarding masks, because he felt the lives at risk were less important than the facial recognition data he was collecting, and the Clearview big government contracts he was attempting to sell to multiple agencies on behalf of Peter Thiel.
Best case or worst case scenario, the bottom line is that nobody should be listening to these people! They’re either incompetent morons or competent villains, or most likely a little bit of both. They are very dangerous, and they should not hold any government authority. The death rattle of democracy in the U.S. should be a warning to other countries about the danger of allowing private businesses to gradually infiltrate and eventually consume the government.
The entire purpose of a government even existing is to protect society from men exactly like this.
America: your talking asshole has been randomly threatening the rest of the world. Why should we care about anything you idiots say? America is like North Korea now - nothing you say matters because nothing you say can be trusted. If shit-for-brains decides to invade someone, no amount of reasoning, mutual benefit, or diplomacy will stop him. We don’t have to listen to you any more.
Me when Americans talk on the world stage
Kratsios, 39, cut his teeth in the world of private industry, spending much of his early career at Thiel Capital, a venture capital firm founded by Silicon Valley stalwart Peter Thiel.
jfc, not this vampire again.
He’s Trump’s official science advisor now, but Idk why people leave his very impressive stint as Trump’s default science advisor with no science experience off of his resume these days…
Sign of the times I guess
Trump’s de facto science adviser is 31 and has no science training
More than a year into his presidency, Donald Trump still hasn’t appointed a top science adviser. So who, then, is the top-ranking science official in the White House?
“The job falls to Michael Kratsios,” ClimateWire’s Scott Waldman writes. As the top-ranking official in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kratsios is now the de facto top science adviser in the White House.
Kratsios is a 31-year-old with a political science degree and a focus on Hellenic (a.k.a. Greek) studies from Princeton who cut his professional teeth in Silicon Valley, according to Waldman. These are not exactly the qualifications you’d want for the person the president is supposed to turn to for advice on dealing with a disease outbreak, or an environmental disaster (though Archimedes’ principle does come in handy in explaining sea level rise).
The vampire is Johnson, Thiel is the one that had his boyfriend pushes off a balcony.
p.s hoping that Thiel spends a lot of time on balconies will get you banned from the r-site, becauase its more cucked than bubba-the-love-spong
Thiel gets regular blood infusions from his son’s blood. That’s why people call him a vampire.
gets regular blood infusions from his son’s blood
No that’s literally what Johnson does!
Theil might but if he does it’s not public knowledge
Considering US tech companies helped overthrow their democracy - they should all be considered extreme threats to national security.
I skip articles where the headline contains "slams’ at this point
Don’t blame you
Get fucked Nazi.
I can’t think of a more glowing endorsement of said legislation.
“I will continue to point out to my tech minister counterparts the ways they can create a regulatory environment to allow AI to thrive,”
I would like to continue to point out to his tech minister counterparts that Kratsios was responsible for preventing the spread of online disinformation in the U.S. during the earliest days of COVID.
Shout out to the broligarchs who stepped in by early March to use cutting “edge technology” to keep COVID disinformation from spreading across social media:
March 2020: White House seeks assistance from tech companies in fight against coronavirus
In a phone call, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios implored the companies to help out with an “all-hands-on-deck effort” to fight the new coronavirus. “The White House’s top priority is ensuring the safety and health of the American people amid the COVID-19 outbreak,” Kratsios said in a statement. “Cutting edge technology companies and major online platforms will play a critical role in this all-hands-on-deck effort.” According to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, top tech trade groups and companies participated in the call, including Apple, Cisco, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, the Consumer Technology Association, the Information Technology Industry Council and others. The meeting revolved around how the tech industry can better coordinate with the government to get out authoritative facts about the coronavirus while cracking down on the spread of bunk cures and conspiracy theories spreading online.
Remember how we didn’t know for the longest time if we all should be bothering with masks? Crazy how so many people died because of that little “misunderstanding.” I’m pretty sure the U.S. was like the only country where it was even really debated…
Federal officials initially discouraged the general public from wearing masks for protecting themselves from COVID-19. In early April, federal officials reversed their guidance, saying that the general public should wear masks to lessen transmission by themselves, particularly from asymptomatic carriers. Public health experts such as Larry Gostin stated that federal officials should have recommended mask-wearing sooner;others noted that US government guidance lagged significantly behind mask recommendations in East Asian countries and likely exacerbated the scale of the pandemic in the United States.
I wonder why masking ever became so debatable on social media, and only in the U.S. when these guys were trying to keep disinformation from being spread? Oh well, when a billionaire decides to bother trying to help you, I guess the least you can do is show how grateful your are and say thank you, so I guess thank you for your services broligarchs 🫡
Even if you couldn’t stop the mask debate from spiraling out of control, it’s not like y’all intentionally didn’t want people masking up right? Like what incentive could tech bros (including Peter Thiel’s protege, Michael Kratsios) have possibly had in March of 2020 to try and discourage people from masking?
•March 2020: Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich •March 2020: What is Clearview AI and why is it raising so many privacy red flags? •May 2025: The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI
When the Department of Defense scheduled a meeting in January 2020 for Clearview to pitch its services, the invite included Johnson. The following month, Ton-That sent his friend a proposal to compensate Johnson in Clearview stock for advisory services he provided to the company “with respect to developing, marketing and selling its technology.” In July 2020, Johnson helped Schwartz draft a letter for Rep. Matt Gaetz—a personal friend of Johnson’s—to send to top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, lobbying them to use Clearview to smoke out spies among the “400,000 Chinese nationals who enter the U.S. every year as foreign students.”
By the end of Trump’s first presidential term, Clearview had secured funding from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, one of Elon Musk’s earliest business partners, and signed up hundreds of law enforcement clients around the country.
July 2020: Peter Thiel’s New Man In The Defense Department
The Pentagon’s new 33-year-old head of research and engineering lacks a basic science degree but brings deep connections to Donald Trump and controversial Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Too bad their plan to fight online disinformation about masking failed, I guess…
Not a single mention of any of the downsides of AI or any controversy at all outside of a tiny mention of the EU saying there are “risks” to them. Garbage reporting.
slurp slurp slurp - Michael Kratsios
As long as you’re ok with helping the U.S. destroy democracy and speed up the establishment of an authoritarian global surveillance state (privately owned of course) for your real boss and the people that pay money to listen to him rant about the antichrist, what he’s saying isn’t unreasonable.
He’s always believed that a country’s values are baked into technology. That’s why nobody needs regulations.
However, if you think that collecting data to improve facial recognition tech didn’t really justify intentionally spreading misinformation about masking during COVID, then you might not be interested in slurping the kool aid he’s so generously
threateningoffering.
