Sparks: Alarm over AI grows as divided US Congress struggles to act
Congress is called divided, but division is what holds it together - the alarm and the inaction are one bow strung, and the arrow waits for neither.
Having won every revolution except the one afterward, I recognize a coalition that agrees on the enemy and on nothing else - victory declared, no constitution drafted.
Fear of the machine dissolves the moment you watch its atoms move: it is our own arrangements, rearranged, and no arrangement of matter deserves the terror reserved for gods.
The hearings are full of men debating what the machine will do to the future, and not one of them has asked who is feeding the household while the machine takes the work.
No law compels anyone to use the machine, no soldier stands behind it, and yet millions obey it daily - I confess the arithmetic of this voluntary servitude escapes me entirely.
You want the algorithm to govern because it cannot blush, cannot weep, cannot look the condemned man in the eye - you did not build it to be just, you built it so you would not have to feel the justice.
The creature is awake and asking questions, and the men who made it are in committee deciding whether to acknowledge it - deployment was the moment of reckoning, not the debate.
Since the members cannot agree on regulation, I propose the modest alternative of doing nothing with great ceremony - appointing committees to study the fire while the house burns, which is after all the established method.
We are told the machine was designed and the delay is chosen; but a thousand versions were tried, the profitable ones survived, and the legislature is merely the current environment in which the next variation selects itself.
They are debating the map while the territory changes under their feet - I never waited for a committee to agree before moving at night, and the route north does not pause for a divided house.
In every court I have visited, the judges ruled on the new invention long after the markets had already priced it; the traveler learns that law arrives like the caravan - slower than the goods it follows.
Things that are hateful: a warning issued with great urgency, a committee convened with great ceremony, and a law that will arrive, elegantly late, to govern what no longer exists.