There is much for liberals to dislike in the massive policy package — President Donald Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill — that the Senate narrowly passed on Tuesday. It’s a supercharged version of longstanding Republican priorities; the wealthy will benefit from tax cuts, while needy people will see their social safety net degraded even more thoroughly into tatters.
As AI becomes ever more embedded in our lives, states can regulate it as they see fit.
However, a key development late in the Senate negotiations deserves celebration regardless of your politics. A House version of the bill would have prevented states from regulating artificial intelligence for the next decade. Once the bill made its way to the Senate, Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Ted Cruz of Texas, both Republicans, agreed that it would be a five-year ban instead. But then Blackburn withdrew her support, meaning that there would be no ban on AI regulation in the bill the Senate has sent back to the House.
That means that as AI becomes ever more embedded in our lives, states can regulate it as they see fit, whether in regard to building data centers or using mortgage algorithms. “The Senate did the right thing today for kids, for families and for our future by voting to strip out the dangerous 10-year ban on state A.I. laws, which had no business being in a budget bill in the first place,” Jim Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, said after the ban was removed from the budget bill in an astonishing 99-to-1 vote.
A useful tracker compiled by the law firm Bryan Cave shows that the nation is a patchwork of AI regulations. Kansas, Wyoming and Arkansas are the only states where legislation has neither been enacted nor introduced. Utah passed a bill prohibiting mental health chatbots; in Texas, similar legislation failed. In California, you have to disclose any manipulated content (i.e., deepfakes) used for electoral purposes; Tennessee has passed the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act (aka, the ELVIS Act; get it?), which “protects voices of songwriters, performers, and celebrities from artificial intelligence and deepfakes by prohibiting the use of AI to mimic a person’s voice without their permission.”
I’m going to spare you a rundown of all 50 states — you get the idea. Legislators across the country, and across the political spectrum, are grappling with what AI will mean for our society, regardless of whether your car bears a MAGA or LGBTQ bumper sticker. Why would anyone want to prevent that?
Kudos to Blackburn for standing up to Big Tech, but it should not have come to this. Last I checked, the Republicans were supposed to be the party of states’ rights — even though that call itself originated as a Jim Crow-era rallying cry to escape school desegregation and other measures related to civil rights protections for Black people. How ironic, then, that some in the GOP wanted the federal government to prevent Massachusetts and Texas from going their respective ways when it comes to tech policy.
But this is about much more than politics.
It is true, AI could hold great promise in fields like medicine, especially when coupled with supercomputing. It may be able to perform tedious tasks, freeing us humans for more interesting and consequential stuff, like inventing new bacon-flavored cocktails.
If human history is any lesson, we will probably end up somewhere in the middle.
Then there’s the not-so-good stuff, such as the threat of AI destroying the world. I wish that were the premise of a new Netflix series. Instead, it is the opinion of some (though by no means not all) experts on the topic. “The best way to understand it emotionally is we are like somebody who has this really cute tiger cub. Unless you can be very sure that it’s not gonna want to kill you when it’s grown up, you should worry,” Jeffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate who is sometimes known as “the Godfather of AI,” recently told CBS News.
If human history is any lesson, we will probably end up somewhere in the middle. Bad actors are already doing everything they can to undermine democracy (see “Mountainhead,” the new film by “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong), but enough good, smart people are on the case to (hopefully) curb malign influences.
Democrats’ love of rules is frequently mocked, and sometimes deservingly so. There is no doubt that we could over-regulate ourselves and stifle innovation, losing out to China in the process. Given how much clout Silicon Valley has come to wield on Capitol Hill, though, I fear that the opposite is more likely to come true: right-wing tech power brokers like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk will likely do everything they can to make sure that we have as little regulation on AI as possible.
That’s why the Senate’s resounding rejection of a state-level legislation moratorium was so important. Politicians in Washington may not agree on much, but they seem to understand that we are at a perilous moment for human civilization, having finally invented machines that are nearly as smart as we are. We have to get this right.