Unregulated artificial intelligence is a new pandemic. Parents know it. Consumers know it. Educators know it. State lawmakers know it. And Members of Congress know it. Blame who you will for COVID-19 or the price of eggs, but there is no question that the harms of AI, like surveillance pricing for those eggs, are being cooked up in the labs of Silicon Valley. And all the tech billionaires want for Christmas is for the federal government to stop state lawmakers from protecting Americans.
Federal unwillingness to regulate Big Tech is a pox on both parties dating back to at least the Obama administration, and so, in recent years, state lawmakers have moved to protect American citizens from tech oligarchs, who have made it clear through their actions that they bear no moral obligation to make products safe or secure or in compliance with healthy social or democratic principles. That such a virulent agenda might now be snuck into the national dense bill of the United States is an absurdity beyond comprehension.
Having failed to pass a 10-year federal moratorium barring state regulation of artificial intelligence in the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—the Senate rejected the provision 99 to 1—Big Tech billionaires now want Congress to attach the same rule to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Among the many hazards inherent to this anti-democratic, anti-American agenda, is that it would in fact undermine national security.
National defense of the U.S. is a holistic calculus that goes beyond soldiers in uniform, weapons on hand, and the PT standards that seem to occupy much of the current secretary’s attention. It is a geographic, economic, intellectual, cultural, technological, and political consideration in which the greatest strength is also the greatest weakness—that it can only truly be eroded from within. Among the core assets of the U.S. is that “States serve as laboratories of democracy,” to quote a November 24 letter signed by dozens of state lawmakers of both parties urging rejection of the AI moratorium…
As state lawmakers and policymakers, we hear regularly from constituents about rising online harms and the growing influence of AI on their lives. In an increasingly fraught digital environment, young people face new risks online, seniors are increasingly targeted by AI-enabled scams, and workers and creators are encountering novel challenges in an AI-driven economy. In the years ahead, AI’s impact will require lawmakers to consider consequential public policy questions, making it essential that states retain the authority to act.
Just as cable or rope strength is derived by combining small strands of material, U.S. policy forged in state “laboratories” is, on the whole, a strength of the American system—especially when those efforts are designed to mitigate specific, identifiable harms to constituents. And those harms sound in the nearly 400 state bills being tracked by Reset Tech, an independent advocacy organization. From children suffering adverse and deadly health effects to unprecedented data privacy abuses, state lawmakers are working overtime to do the job Congress has yet to do despite years of strident hearings promising to hold Big Tech accountable for its culture of negligence.
For now, the least Congress can do is stay out of the way, and few if any of their constituents will complain that they declined to give Big Tech another free pass—let alone ten more years—to do whatever they want with our data, with jobs, with child safety, with national security. No industry enjoys such latitude, and no ordinary citizen of any political party benefits from the technological pandemic that will surely run amok at the speed of AI.
Americans across the political spectrum have seen through Big Tech’s bullshit, and they’re not buying it anymore. Generic promises of “innovation” don’t mean anything to parents trying to navigate the dangers of social media and chat products, or to seniors increasingly vulnerable to scams, or even to business enterprises trying to balance the opportunities of AI with the novel security risks it presents. Nobody is going to thank Congress or the White House for preventing state legislators working to protect children, consumers, and local businesses. The idea of attaching such a provision to the NDAA is as politically naive as it is bad for the country.
Photo courtesy of Eric Feinberg, Coalition for a Safer Web.
