On: Trump’s ‘biggest miscalculation’? How one adviser steered the great AI freakout

One man. That is the mechanism - a single counselor, his fortune staked in the very machines he was asked to judge, standing between the executive and every proposal to restrain them; and the executive, hearing nothing else, concluding he has heard the country.

I have audited enough charters to know where to look. Not at the speeches about innovation and national genius - those are the brochure. Look at the ledger. The adviser holds positions in the industry; the industry seeks exemption from oversight; the adviser counsels against oversight. The conclusion writes itself in double entry. When the man who holds the veto also holds the asset, that veto is not counsel. It is self-dealing in the costume of advice.

It will be objected that the market disciplines reckless enterprise better than any statute. The objection holds for a mill or a canal, whose failures ruin only their creditors. But a machine that reasons, persuades, and acts at the scale of a continent is not a mill. Scale transforms the problem. A fire in one house is the owner’s affair; a fire beside the powder magazine is the town’s - and this one is being built beside the magazine by men who insist the powder is inert.

What stings is not the capture but the ease of it. Both factions in the legislature have declared themselves willing to act, and the executive answers with the private judgment of one interested party. This is the very contingency the design anticipated: not a tyrant in a crown, but an interested counselor in the antechamber. The remedy was written down. Congress holds the power of regulation. Let it exercise that power, or confess the separation of powers was ornament.

I am angry - not at the machine, at the plumbing.