OBAMA: We know the guys who are funding them, and if you talk to Larry Page or others, their general attitude, understandably, is, “The last thing we want is a bunch of bureaucrats slowing us down as we chase the unicorn out there.”

Part of the problem that we’ve seen is that our general commitment as a society to basic research has diminished. Our confidence in collective action has been chipped away, partly because of ideology and rhetoric.

The analogy that we still use when it comes to a great technology achievement, even 50 years later, is a moonshot. And somebody reminded me that the space program was 0.5% of GDP. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but in today’s $ that would be $80B that we would be spending annually … on AI. Right now we’re spending probably less than $1B. That undoubtedly will accelerate, but part of what we’re gonna have to understand is that if we want the values of a diverse community represented in these breakthrough technologies, then government funding has to be a part of it. And if government is not part of financing it, then all these issues that Joi has raised about the values embedded in these technologies end up being potentially lost or at least not properly debated.

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