At Wednesday’s Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, Vice President J.D. Vance launched a salvo in a developing culture war within the tech industry by characterizing artificial intelligence as a “communist technology” and portraying cryptocurrency as a counterweight that promotes freedom.
The remarks highlight concerns that tech developments coming out of Silicon Valley could have significant and long-lasting effects on the partisan balance of power in Washington, and they are meat for a crypto community that has come to hate President Joe Biden’s administration and its stance on regulating digital assets.
Although it’s a bit of a “overstatement” to suggest that AI is “a left-leaning or communist technology” and cryptocurrency is a “conservative technology,” Vance noted that there is a “fundamental element of truth” to this distinction.
“What I’ve noticed is that very smart right-wing people in tech tend to be attracted to bitcoin (BTCUSD) and crypto, and very smart left-wing people in tech tend to be attracted to AI,” Vance said.
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Leaders in the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries have worked to dispel the myths that big language models exhibit partisan bias against Democrats and that crypto is just for Republicans. Even though the vice president’s language exaggerates the situation, there is data that backs up this viewpoint.
Vance’s assertion is somewhat supported by research from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. According to a study conducted in November by marketing academics Cait Lamberton, David Rubenstein, and John Zhang, “confidence in cryptocurrency increases as political conservatism increases.”
According to survey data gathered for the report, the authors wrote that this is partially because conservatives are more prone to trust decentralized systems.
“Rather that feeling that trust is best placed in institutions like the Federal Reserve, conservatives tend to place more stock in distributed trust,” they stated.
According to a study released earlier this month by political scientist Andrew Hall and colleagues at Stanford University, the general public believes that large language models like ChatGPT, which has received significant support from Microsoft (MSFT), Google’s (GOOGL) (GOOG) Gemini, and Meta’s (META) Llama provide left-leaning answers to questions.
According to a summary of the study, “We find that nearly all [AI] models are perceived as significantly left-leaning – even by Democrats,” Hall stated.
Hall discovered that most models will modify their responses if asked to adopt a neutral position, making the result appear more neutral to the people the authors polled.
Vance stated he wants crypto technologists to be aware of their colleagues’ work at AI labs, although it is unclear if these effects are due to the politics of AI engineers.
“I’d ask you all to remember that what happens in AI is very much going to affect in good and bad ways what happens in bitcoin,” Vance stated. “Make sure you’re keeping tabs on and staying involved in what’s happening in artificial intelligence.”
