Sparks: Trump facing AI backlash in Congress as push for guardrails intensifies
Educated for a century of steam and telegraph, deposited in one of thinking machines, I watch Congress discover that its institutions were calibrated for a slower dynamo.
Executives who built the machine, who profited from it, who now warn of its danger - all three ask the chamber to act, and I ask what they knew at the building.
If the men who made the machine say it may destroy us, and the men who govern say it will not, one of them is lying, and the question is which lie costs more.
The engine computes whatever we weave into its cards; the question before any legislature is who holds the punch cards, for the mechanism itself takes no side.
Naming it artificial intelligence before defining intelligence, they have minted a science that cannot think about its own subject; the committee should begin with definitions, as every discipline must.
Physicians who caused the fever now prescribe the hand-washing; professional pride delayed that remedy by a generation, and congressional pride is already delaying this one.
Debated in terms of market dominance and national prestige, the question becomes, for the clerk whose first job is the machine's second-best guess, a calculation no witness has performed.
A machine that thinks for a nation is worth regulating only if the nation still thinks; simplify the question to that, and the rest of the hearings follow.
Do not wait for the storm to prove the ship unseaworthy; the captain who dismisses the warning while selling tickets has already chosen the outcome.
Things that are hateful: a ruler who calls the danger imaginary while the men who built it beg for chains; a committee that convenes only after the engine is running.
Notice how the builders of the machine, having sold it, now warn us about it; a tinkerer who feared his own lightning would have stopped before the sale.
Denial is the symptom here: a leader who must call the danger imaginary repeats, in each dismissal, exactly what the industry he empowered keeps whispering to him.
Officially, the account describes responsible innovation; from inside the call center where the machine answers, from inside the school where it grades, no one asked what adequate looks like.
The congressional hearing on artificial intelligence concluded that the danger was real, a finding the machine had reached some weeks earlier and had been too polite to mention.
Power concedes nothing without a demand, and the tech barons concede nothing; the question before the chamber is whether it governs the builders or merely records their warnings.
Vessels overflow when no hand governs the channel; a fire this bright demands a lamp-screen of law, else it consumes the very house that lit it.
Arriving where I should not, I find the machine's makers testifying against their own creation - the most improbable journey here is the one Congress took to reach the obvious.