Unfinished Genus

“Liberalism, like conservatism, is less of a policy agenda or a coherent political movement than it is a sensibility and a set of attitudes. It is not a platform or a party. The foundation liberalism provides is by no means prior to politics, but it is, in a sense, prior to the familiar divides and controversies in American politics in the current era. I disagree with your typical left-leaning New York Times columnist … on a great many things, but, if we agree on some fundamental things—the rule of law, freedom of speech, due process, the dangers of official corruption, etc.—then there is room to cooperate, and a need to cooperate, on those things when our shared bedrock values are threatened, as they are now.”

“A socialist model, as opposed to a welfare model, would mean having the government own and run the farms, food-processing plants, and grocery stores in the same way the government owns and operates the government schools, in which the teachers and administrators are state employees teaching that which the state mandates. Such a socialist enterprise would need to attempt to centrally plan the production, processing, and distributing of food in accordance with what the state judges to be the proper set of priorities.… New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s imbecilic idea for government-run grocery stores did not come out of nowhere, though it apparently has not occurred to him to ask anybody who has lived under such a system how well that worked.”

“There is something inherent about human accountability that you cannot get with AI. That’s not up to the AI companies—that’s up to the downstream organizations who are deploying AI, and, if it becomes necessary, regulation to insist that this be the case. This is what we’ve done historically with many technologies that are very powerful but dangerous. I like the analogy of a crane operator. The crane can do the heavy lifting in construction—we don’t need human physical labor. But even though we could, we don’t let the crane operate autonomously. We put an operator in it, and the crane becomes a massive amplifier of human ability. That’s the model we think is the right one, and we can choose to keep it that way. We can’t guarantee that it will be that way, but I don’t think it’s a matter of the tech companies themselves deciding.”