The Human Side of Artificial Intelligence
On Sunday, Speaker Mike Johnson was a guest on Jake Tapper’s CNN show, State of the Union. He was asked about recent calls from within the Artificial Intelligence industry itself to put safeguards in place. Indeed, just the day before, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing development within the field to allow for safety measures to catch up with advances.
Given that industry leaders, like Anthropic, are themselves acknowledging the potential of dangers and saying that action of some sort should be taken to slow progress in their own business, to help protect society, it would seem a no-brainer for Congress to get involved. Yet Johnson gave a surprising answer. Well, “surprising” for someone Mike Johnson – the man of whom Trump said behind closed doors, “I am the speaker and the president – and Johnson, the actual Speaker of the House, never pushed back or even raised a whimper. Bless his heart, as he is wont to say.
Trying his best to sound thoughtful, an exercise that is apparently outside his skillset, Johnson explained to Tapper what the problem is to do such a thing. “The guys who are raising the alarms all have very different ideas about what the guardrails should be,” he stated. “There's no consensus among them, and Congress is obviously less qualified than the people who are pushing this frontier."
Go tell. Gee, if only there was a mechanism of some sort for the House of Representative and Senate to each put together a group of members who meet regularly and have oversight of their field, and they could then invite experts in the field – people who are obviously more qualified – to be questioned in public by a (I don’t know, let’s call it) “panel” of these members of Congress. And then they and their staffs would do research and put together a “report” with input from those experts and form a consensus of what guardrails could be implemented. Into a kind of “bill.” And then…and then -- if it gets enough support… -- and then a law!
Yes, I know that’s a bold and radical suggestion. But I’m a dreamer. A visionary, some might say. And a bit of a self-taught authority on the minutiae of how Congress works.
I mean…I mean, my god, what a breathtakingly empty response from Johnson. Which, in fairness, is his standard. After all, this is a man who likened himself to Moses, yet whenever asked about something that’s made headlines across the country that he doesn’t have the courage to address, his default answer is implausibly that he hadn’t read about that yet. Hey, at least here he acknowledged being aware of the concern. So, that’s a big step forward for him.
For all his many flaws, Mike Johnson is not ignorant and knows how Congress works. He knows that Congress is not made up of leading experts in important fields of science and industry. He knows that Congress has committees. He knows that Congress relies on experts. He knows that Congress creates laws that set up guardrails.
And it’s even more basic. Mike Johnson knows that members of Congress don’t do double-duty as food inspectors. He knows that members of Congress are not economists who, based solely on their own lack of experience, set standards for the Security and Exchange Commission. He knows that members of Congress are not medical experts, physicists, sociologists who understand the intricacies of health, atomic energy and human services. Which is why Congress gets input from these experts. The people who are the most qualified.
Yet when it comes to AI, Mike Johnson wants to plead ignorance on how Congress works. Which, ironically, makes him the poster boy for artificial intelligence. Still though, ignorance of Congress is a strange position for the Speaker of the House. Even if Trump says he himself is speaker, which appears closer to the truth than one might think.
Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Delaware) expressed Mike Johnson abrogation of duty concisely in response. “This is just the dumbest possible excuse to not do anything as a Congress,” she said. "Do your job as a legislator or get out."
Normally, I would end there. It’s a great quote and spot on. But I feel it’s appropriate to add something that has fallen through the cracks of time, and it’s too important to be lost. So, I like to repeat it occasionally on social media, and now here.
It’s your reminder that Mike Johnson was one of the leaders in 2020 of the House effort to block counting Electoral votes and overthrow democracy.
So, “Do your job as a legislator or get out” fits here, too! And a fine way to end.
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