David Friedberg: Obama Doesn’t Understand AI and He’s Making Prosperity Political President Obama last week: “If we are thinking about AI just in terms of how do we cure cancer or get better energy, you can do that without having agentic AI. That's a misalignment between what our society needs and the commercial imperatives that these companies are facing.” @friedberg: “These words honestly just, they made me, like, emotionally distressed that if he's a leader that people listen to and he doesn't really articulate accurately what's going on, it's sad that we've lost the plot. I think it's sad that we aren't all kind of holding hands saying, ‘My God, the future is here, and we all get to leap forward, and we get to bring people up.’ For years, Obama orated beautifully about the importance of bringing people up, about giving people the opportunity to progress, about letting people advance themselves. And there's never been a more equalizing technology, a better economic opportunity for prosperity for everyone than these technologies, than these tools. And to hand wave the word agentic and say we don't need agentic AI to solve cancer shows how little he actually understands how this technology works and how it's all become just a shorthand for a political fight to what? What are you fighting for? What is the political battle that says, ‘I am going to leave half the population behind, and I'm going to make an argument against prosperity for all, in order to make my party look like a morally superior party, and to cast the other side as bad when the other side has literally discovered fire and the world now has fire, and we're going to go take water and throw it on the fire.’ No one gets fire because the other guys are saying that fire is good.”