The House plans to leave for recess in days. They've accomplished nothing on AI regulation. The window to act is closing, which assumes there was ever a window to begin with.
Washington has been scrambling. That's the word they're using. Scrambling implies coordinated movement toward a goal. What's actually happening is a group of people who can't define artificial intelligence are now tasked with regulating it. They've had years to figure this out. They chose instead to hold hearings where they asked ChatGPT's CEO if the internet is dangerous.
The calls for guardrails are getting louder. Guardrails from whom? Retail traders who think AI means buying NVDA at the top? Tech lobbyists who've already written the bills they want passed? The same regulatory bodies that needed fifteen years to understand what a cryptocurrency was and still got it wrong?
Here's what happens next: nothing. The House goes home. Everyone forgets about AI regulation until some chatbot tells a teenager something unfortunate and CNN runs a special. Then we get another round of scrambling, which is just more hearings with worse questions.
The best part is calling it a narrow window. Windows don't close on legislative failures. They were never open. Congress moves at the speed of whoever donated the most money, and tech companies have been writing checks while everyone else was busy arguing about whether robots have feelings.
Nobody in Washington understands the technology they're regulating. Nobody writing the rules can explain how a neural network functions. But they're scrambling. They're concerned. They're deeply committed to doing something right after they finish doing nothing.
The midterms are in November. That's the real deadline. Not AI safety. Not protecting consumers. Not preventing whatever sci-fi nightmare keeps the fearmongers employed. Just getting home in time to pretend they care about their districts.
Your AI guardrails are being written by people who ask Alexa to call their grandson.
Photo by Adam Michael Szuscik on Unsplash
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