Congress Faces Dangerous Outbreak Of Governing
Congress developed a dangerous case of bipartisan governing Tuesday as Republicans and Democrats discussed artificial intelligence safeguards despite President Donald Trump’s assurances that advanced technology becomes harmless when supervised by a president who types warnings in capital letters. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, John Curtis and Maria Cantwell participated in talks involving federal oversight, risk assessments and hearings with technology executives, reviving the discredited Washington practice of examining a problem before it becomes irreversible. The House compounded the emergency by overwhelmingly approving the Ratepayer Protection Act, which advances the extremist position that data centers, rather than nearby families, should pay for the electricity consumed by data centers.
Trump defended the technology industry’s traditional right to construct civilization-altering machinery first and search for the off switch during congressional litigation. “The only guardrail artificial intelligence needs is me, because I have tremendous intelligence, much more than the artificial intelligence, which frankly is very artificial and probably uses windmills,” Trump said in the definitive account of his position. “Congress wants computers filling out forms while China has computers taking every job, including jobs our computers have not invented yet.” Administration officials explained that testing products before mass deployment would cripple innovation by forcing companies to spend valuable weeks determining whether their systems can manipulate elections, eliminate livelihoods, expose military secrets or convert a metropolitan power grid into one extremely expensive cryptocurrency furnace.
The bipartisan proposals also contemplate tracking national-security risks and asking executives questions more probing than “How quickly can this replace the people conducting the hearing?” Supporters argued that modest safeguards could protect workers, consumers, civil liberties and electrical customers, four constituencies whose failure to own major technology platforms has severely limited their influence. Industry leaders warned that regulation could surrender America’s competitive advantage to China, which is presumed to gain strength whenever an American corporation must document what its product does. Trump’s alternative remains more efficient: remove the brakes, blindfold the driver, declare the map anti-business and accelerate until the United States wins the race by being first to leave the road. This is now the nation’s official definition of artificial intelligence safety.
* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.