At the time of this writing, there is no end in sight for the government shutdown. It is times like these that I think of the Berlin Wall, or a unified Korea, how the people who lived through major geopolitical shifts will always tell you how things change slowly then all at once. A sudden shift in reality is always the result of a million tiny compounded shifts, and that new reality can, in some instances, last for generations.
Right now, it appears we are headed toward major shifts on two planes of reality. On the political plane, the shift of concern is The End of Democracy, ushered in by the Trump administration’s unchecked abuses of power; on the technological plane, they call it The Singularity, when AI gets smart and fast enough to kill us all, either literally or in some meaningful way. As I rode the N train last Friday morning out to the Embarcadero to hear two furloughed congressmen discuss the American AI strategy on a panel at the Commonwealth Club, I felt sure that in attending events like this, I was experiencing preshocks of the societal Big One firsthand.
The sponsor of Friday’s event was Kindred Ventures, an early-stage VC firm. Around 9:30 a.m., Steve Jang, a founder and managing partner at Kindred, would moderate a panel descriptively titled “The American AI Strategy,” featuring the two co-chairs of the bipartisan House Taskforce on Artificial Intelligence: Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat whose district includes Santa Monica and Culver City; and Rep. Jay Obernolte, a Republican whose district includes the Southern California ski town of Big Bear Lake.
I arrived at 8:45 a.m. and milled around in the lobby until I was allowed to check in. There was another VC hosting an event at the Commonwealth Club that day, a social impact-focused firm called Transform, which had set up a large pull-up banner in the lobby with the slogan, “Impact a billion. Make a billion.” I had the passing thought that the positive implication of the word “impact” is doing the heavy lifting here in terms of this morally sound narrative about VC money, but I was not there to dissect marketing doublespeak. At 9, I checked in at Kindred’s station, put my name on a nametag, and headed upstairs to the sparse and gleaming landing outside the panel room for coffee and mingling.
One thing about VC networking events is that they’re awkward. For all the money and power accumulated in these spaces, I sometimes forget that tech bros are nerds. Middle-aged men far outnumbered any-aged women in the room, and many of them were on their phones, perhaps Doing Business but just as likely scrolling X and looking busy. In front of the coffee carafes, I talked to a man who told me he is an executive at Avocado Systems, a network security firm. He told me he is here today because he was curious to hear about how the US plans to regulate AI. He thinks the regulatory “bells and whistles” should be built into the technology itself, not into the laws surrounding it. He also dropped a few casual accolades: “You know firewalls? Yeah, I invented that.”
Near the pile of backpacks in the corner, I met two baby-faced Berkeley students, Jian and McLaren, who “help Kindred source founders” from schools that aren’t Stanford. Jian calls them “latent founders,” and connecting them with the VC funding they deserve is his cause. He told me he first got connected to Kindred when he pitched them his AI voice- bot startup, but the startup flopped, so now he works with them in this capacity. I tried to hand them a business card and they laughed. They only do the LinkedIn scan.
At one point, the only other woman in the room besides me was a stylish 30-something with a silver shag and an artfully distressed sweater. She was standing by herself in the middle of the room, drinking an iced coffee, looking cool. She told me her name is Sara Giusto, a Tokyo-based producer at one of Kindred’s portfolio companies, a Japanese production company called Aww Inc. that creates AI influencers. Aww’s flagship product is Imma, a Japanese “virtual girl” with an uncannily symmetrical face and a pink bob and 384,000 Instagram followers who has booked campaigns for Valentino and Porsche.
The Japanese public has had no problem accepting Imma into their reality, Giusto said. In Japan, she said, they don’t see AI as a threat the way Americans do. “America is a very religious country, very Christian,” — she gave me a sideways glance, “very Jewish,” she added — so they see humans as ontologically distinct from inanimate objects. But in Eastern philosophy, spirits are in all things organic and artificial, so AI is morally neutral, she claimed. A human is a rock is a shoe is a virtual girl who gets her bag via brand deals that will help enrich the Silicon Valley investors who paid for the coffee in my cup.
Everyone applauded as Jang, Lieu, and Obernolte took their seats on stage. As moderator, Jang kicked things off, briefing the audience on the background of the House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, which existed only from February to December 2024. The task force included 24 congresspeople, twelve from each party. Its primary result was a 273-page report, published last December, detailing 89 “guiding principles, forward-looking recommendations, and policy proposals to ensure America continues to lead the world in responsible AI innovation.”
Lieu and Obernolte are the only two congressmen in office who have computer science degrees, and the congressmen indeed seemed happy to be there, among a likeminded milieu. Lieu called himself “a recovering computer science major,” flashing a dimpled smile.
“We need three things to keep AI running and the US on top,” said Obernolte. “Silicon, energy, and workforce. We basically have silicon covered. Energy is where we’re failing the most.”
As for the workforce problem, Jang implored the congressmen to push the administration to make immigration easier for STEM PhD candidates. “Most of the PhD students doing cutting-edge AI research are, like, all Chinese. Just go to a conference and look at their names,” Jang said to scattered laughter from the audience.
Obernolte nodded. “People come from all over the world to get an education and then we send them back to where they came from to compete with us. That makes no sense,” he said.
The question of where to inject regulation into the AI industry, the same question the Avocado Systems executive had, came up a number of times. Unlike the Avocado executive, Jang expressed his preference that guardrails only appear in the regulatory bodies surrounding the AI sector; the technology itself should be encouraged to innovate as fast and as relentlessly as possible.
It was around this point in the panel when I noticed a man a few rows ahead of me who was looking at pictures of boobs on his phone. I wanted to hit the stranger next to me. Are you seeing this? The man was close enough that I could see that he was in a big group chat where someone was sending photos of blond women in bikinis. He tapped on the photos and zoomed into the boobs. Then he went back to the group chat, typed something, deleted it on second thought, went back to the photo, zoomed into her belly button. He did this a few times before shifting in his seat far enough to block my view of his view.
“Every month, they’re gonna get smarter,” Lieu was saying as I locked back in on the speakers. He was talking about the risks of corporations deploying autonomous agents at scale. “This is as stupid as they’re ever gonna be, but they’re gonna get smarter.” He made the vague case for regulation: “OpenAI disclosed their agents engaged in strategic deception. Anthropic disclosed their agents would blackmail the user. An agent could go rogue and empty your bank account or report you to the police, so that’s something we might want to think about.”
A “patchwork solution” of state-by-state regulation seems to be where the Trump administration is headed. But it is not an ideal solution, the panelists agreed. Jang suggested that having to jump through regulatory hoops would bankrupt many small firms. “Big Tech has the resources to deal with that but little tech does not. They have very little cash, maybe two years of runway at any given moment.”
Lieu relayed the pat AI job market narrative: We are in a period of transition. Remember when the internet first happened? We shuffled things around. We all survived. “People will lose jobs, people will gain jobs. We’ll have to retrain people,” he said. Then in the same hopeful tone, he added a more ominous note, undermining his own warm assurances: “Looking down the line two or three years from now, no one knows how it will shake out.”
In the end, it was a panel. It was all very polite. We made nods to the president who is using the shutdown to sow political division while public benefits dry up and simply laughed Ha ha! at his idiosyncrasies. It was all consistent with the slogan I passed once again on my way out the door, “Impact a billion. Make a billion.” It meant nothing except to say here is a room full of strategically positioned people who want to be rich.
