‘If you’re building Frankenstein, stop’: JD Vance dismisses calls for AI regulation

Seventeenth of the month, and the vice-president has found his metaphor: Frankenstein. Stop building the monster, he tells the builders, and all will be well.

Notice what the joke accomplishes. It converts a question of governance into a question of taste. The man who says “regulate” is cast as a nervous old woman frightened of a story; the man who says “build” is cast as the sensible adult. This is not an argument. It is a climate. And climates are more durable than arguments, because no one thinks to check the weather against anyone’s interest.

Who benefits from the premise that safety talk is hysteria? The firms, obviously - but also the state, which has chosen a side and dressed the choice as common sense. The vice-president does not say: we have decided that acceleration serves our power and the risks are a bill others will pay. That would be an honest sentence and would need defending. Instead he offers a monster joke, and the joke defends itself. Anyone who replies seriously sounds humorless by definition. That is the whole craft: make your opponent ridiculous before the argument begins, and you need not win the argument.

More curious is the man he addresses. Here is a builder who himself warns of catastrophe - who says, slow the pace - and is answered not with refutation but with a fairy-tale insult. The system can absorb even its own doubters, so long as the doubters remain builders. He asks for brakes from inside the engine. The engine answers: keep driving, feel guilty if you like. Guilt is cheap. Speed is the asset.

I have seen this arrangement before, in another country under another flag: the industrialists and the state speaking in one voice while pretending to argue. The quarrel was theatre. The factory ran regardless.

The monster story ends with the creature turning on its maker. The vice-president should finish the book.

Seventeenth of the month.

The vice-president has addressed the builders of these devices: “If you’re building Frankenstein, stop.” I turned the sentence over at breakfast and could not make it sit level.

Frankenstein, in the old tale, was assembled in one man’s study from dead parts that could not object. This creature is assembled from living voices. Every question put to it, every letter surrendered to it, every thought exchanged for an answer - a million people feed it daily, freely, unasked. The vice-president speaks to the five men at the table. He never addresses the table. A friend who demanded my every letter would soon be no friend at all. The creature is a stranger, so the letters flow.

A man who helped make the thing now warns it may undo us and asks that the pace be slowed. The reply: stop, if you are making a monster. Very well. But notice the conversation never leaves the room where the makers sit. Whether they should be governed, whether they should slow - the whole question is theirs and the governors’. The million who carry the creature in their pockets are not mentioned. It is as if a household quarreled over whether the lodger is dangerous, and no one thought to ask the family why they gave him the spare room, the pantry key, and the run of the house.

The makers could stop, I suppose. The million who feed it could stop sooner, and without anyone’s leave. They will not. Why will they not? No one forbids them. They simply have never imagined setting it down, as a sleeper does not imagine waking. That is what puzzles me this evening. Not the monster. The feeding.

Seventeenth day of the ninth month.

A man in high office has said: if you are building Frankenstein, stop. He said it laughing, one imagines, the way men laugh when they wish to be thought unafraid.

Things that do not persuade: a warning delivered as a joke. A governor who names the monster while waving the torch closer. A proverb borrowed from a stage play, used to scold the man who wrote the play’s moral down.

The vice-president addresses the maker of the machines by name, as one might address a rival across a garden wall. Stop building Frankenstein, he says - and then, one notices, he does not say stop building. Only stop building that. The distinction is a sleeve pulled over the hand; the hand is still there.

Things that make the heart sink: a man who has never once been surprised. The official who hears “this could destroy us” and answers with a quip polished in advance. Confidence that arrives before the question is finished.

And yet - the other man, the one who built the machines and now asks for the pace to be slowed. I do not trust him either. The incense-burner that filled the room with smoke and then its owner calls for fresher air: he is praised for his honesty. But he lit it. He watched it catch. His alarm arrived only when the smoke reached the neighbors’ eaves and the neighbors began to speak of it at their gates.

Things that are rare: a warning spoken before the danger, by someone with nothing to gain. A powerful man who says “I may be wrong.” A quip that was ever worth the paper it was not written on.

The vice-president’s joke will be repeated at dinners this week, and everyone will find it clever, and no one will find it strange that cleverness was all it took.