Another day, another #AI bill. This week it is Senators Warner and Blackburn who have introduced their, ‘‘Promoting United States Leadership in Standards Act of 2024.’’ And it’s actually not a bad bill! But as I’ve noted before, we appear to be well on our way to witnessing every member of Congress introducing their own #artificialintelligence legislative proposal.
I’ve never seen anything like this sort of volume of personalized legislating in the field of tech policy. Everyone is screaming to be heard and waving around their own approach to AI governance. Apparently lawmakers have brought the same skill they have for introducing bills to rename post offices to the field of AI policy. Except the difference is that the post office bills actually pass!
The confusing and contentious cacophony of “HEY, LOOK AT MY BILL!” AI legislating will mean even less of a chance that any actual artificial intelligence legislation gets done. I’d say current odds of any major AI bill passing this session are now under 1%, and not just because it is an election year.
I would not necessarily have a big problem with the lack of congressional action except that this leaves the White House and federal administrative agencies free to continue to do whatever they want on AI policy without any explicit statutory grant of authority to do most of it. And as President Biden’s recent AI executive order shows, this administration will take full advantage of that legislative vacuum.
Meanwhile, state and local governments continue to introduce an avalanche of AI-related proposals to regulate what is clearly a national set of technologies, and many of those parochial measures are now getting passed. This raises the specter of a patchwork of hundreds of different AI compliance policies and mounds of red tape that will suffocate algorithmic entrepreneurialism and investment.
In a better world, Congress wouldn’t be such a dysfunctional mess and lawmakers would act to constrain both the powers of administrative agencies as well as state and local governments who are looking to over-regulate this important set of computational technologies, which have global significance to the United States, its national competitiveness, and our geopolitical security. But that will almost certainly not happen for all the reasons I have laid out in my recent essays on the increasingly absurd world of AI policymaking in Congress, which is mostly about performative politics and personal ego-stroking.
We are witnessing a complete reversal of the winning policy formula that gave us the Internet and the Digital Revolution. This could be an unmitigated disaster for America as our nation faces stiff competition on advanced computation from China and other countries.
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