If asked to name the absolute worst Democratic and Republican Senators when it comes to technology and innovation policy, it would be difficult to come up with any worse than Richard Blumenthal from the Democratic side and Josh Hawley from the GOP side. Both have extremely long histories of having absolutely terrible, free speech destroying, privacy destroying ideas about the internet, going back to before each were in the Senate. When both of them were state Attorneys General (Blumenthal in Connecticut, Hawley in Missouri), both used baseless attacks on tech companies as a key way to get headlines and propel them into the Senate.
In the Senate, each have been even worse. Blumenthal gave us FOSTA and has been pushing a ton of other bad ideas, including the EARN IT Act, which, after denying it for a while, Blumenthal admitted is his plan to destroy encryption. Hawley, best known for raising a fist in support insurrectionists he then ran away from, has had less success actually getting bills turned into law, but he has regularly pushed nonsense bills, such as a ban on TikTok. But many of his tech bills really show that deep down inside, Hawley is really just jealous he could never make it working in tech as a product manager, so he has to use the power of the state (while decrying the power of the state) to force websites to work the way he would have designed them. Apparently, this abuse of state power to force companies to make design choices he approves of is Hawley’s way of pretending he’s masculine.
Anyway, Blumenthal and Hawley, who have never had a policy idea for tech that made any sense, think they’ve got AI regulations all figured out. Apparently… it’s an awful lot of government control, state power, and licenses. Very masculine.
The leaders of the Senate judiciary’s subcommittee for privacy, technology and law said in interviews on Thursday that their framework will include requirements for the licensing and auditing of A.I., the creation of an independent federal office to oversee the technology, liability for companies for privacy and civil rights violations, and requirements for data transparency and safety standards.
The full plan is to be revealed on Tuesday, but it’s likely that some of their framework meshes with the bill they already announced a few months ago, which would tie AI and Section 230 (which both of them hate) together, putting liability on AI companies, even for content created at the direction of users, not the companies themselves.
I get that AI tools seem big and scary, especially to folks like Hawley and Blumenthal (who both seem willing to fall for any and all moral panics around technology), but licensing, liability, and audits for a new emerging technology is exactly how you kill all domestic innovation around that technology, and hand it off to China.
This is not to deny that there are real risks associated with AI, because of course there are. But history has shown time and time again that in highly dynamic and emerging areas of innovation, no one is particularly good at accurately weighing the risks and benefits, and being overly proscriptive about that technology, often means trying to prevent a harm that is not really at risk, while limiting many of the benefits. There are better ways, involving enabling experimentation, but just being more aware and careful about the consequences of that innovation.
But, doing that doesn’t get Blumenthal and Hawley headlines. Creating a licensing board so that only approved technologies are allowed does.
