Federalism works best on policies that are local by nature. For example, a national building code makes no sense. 50 separate policies on immigration make no sense either.
AI and social media and Internet regulation in general is perhaps the most non-localist issue possible. It's located in an imaginary place called cyberspace and anything that happens there affects everyone on the entire globe. This is especially true for AI.
I can't imagine a more clear cut case for federal preemption. This article talks a lot about freedom, but the whole point of Commonplace is not maximal liberty but the pursuit of the common good. Defining that requires a broad national standard; 50 separate "common goods" don't work.
What I would like to see is regulation regarding resource consumption, especially water. These data centers consume massive quantities of power and water, leaving the communities they are built in starving for those same resources.
The imposition of liability on creators/providers of AI tools is itself a very dangerous step. The Left is already trying this with guns, fossil fuels and assorted chemicals. Where exactly does such a concept end? I can make an argument that almost all food is a GMO. Tough luck if you're not a hunter/gatherer and an unimaginative one at that. Expanding such a concept to AI would stifle all innovation. Can you prove in court that you didn't use Claude?
Guns, fossil fuels, and even chemicals make for a poor analogy; a more apt one would be Covid-19 - because then you are playing “let’s see what happens if . . .”
Interesting essay, but I don’t think I’m convinced. A federal preemption that merely sets a floor and not a ceiling is not much preemption in this arena. This is not like the minimum wage. This is more like letting California legislate car standards for the rest of the country. Or the mess of regulations that have to be disclosed with every single credit app or report, but with significantly greater potential for throttling technology.
“Only 33?” That’s only right now. In the absence of preemption, that only gets worse over time. Not because there may be more (though that’s possible), but precisely because of what the author cites as an advantage: a coalescing consensus. Suppose that consensus begins to ramp up the constraints? And trotting out the old “laboratories of democracy” aphorism isn’t very helpful. It’s just a slogan that gets used when one side wants to avoid federalizing an issue. In this case, it’s worse. Colorado’s terrible bill, California’s, Hawaii’s and other deep-fake regulatory violations of the First Amendment, and other examples illustrate that the states have very little business regulating a technology they don’t understand within a constitutional framework they seem to understand even less. .
Federalism works best on policies that are local by nature. For example, a national building code makes no sense. 50 separate policies on immigration make no sense either.
AI and social media and Internet regulation in general is perhaps the most non-localist issue possible. It's located in an imaginary place called cyberspace and anything that happens there affects everyone on the entire globe. This is especially true for AI.
I can't imagine a more clear cut case for federal preemption. This article talks a lot about freedom, but the whole point of Commonplace is not maximal liberty but the pursuit of the common good. Defining that requires a broad national standard; 50 separate "common goods" don't work.
What I would like to see is regulation regarding resource consumption, especially water. These data centers consume massive quantities of power and water, leaving the communities they are built in starving for those same resources.
The imposition of liability on creators/providers of AI tools is itself a very dangerous step. The Left is already trying this with guns, fossil fuels and assorted chemicals. Where exactly does such a concept end? I can make an argument that almost all food is a GMO. Tough luck if you're not a hunter/gatherer and an unimaginative one at that. Expanding such a concept to AI would stifle all innovation. Can you prove in court that you didn't use Claude?
Guns, fossil fuels, and even chemicals make for a poor analogy; a more apt one would be Covid-19 - because then you are playing “let’s see what happens if . . .”
Interesting essay, but I don’t think I’m convinced. A federal preemption that merely sets a floor and not a ceiling is not much preemption in this arena. This is not like the minimum wage. This is more like letting California legislate car standards for the rest of the country. Or the mess of regulations that have to be disclosed with every single credit app or report, but with significantly greater potential for throttling technology.
“Only 33?” That’s only right now. In the absence of preemption, that only gets worse over time. Not because there may be more (though that’s possible), but precisely because of what the author cites as an advantage: a coalescing consensus. Suppose that consensus begins to ramp up the constraints? And trotting out the old “laboratories of democracy” aphorism isn’t very helpful. It’s just a slogan that gets used when one side wants to avoid federalizing an issue. In this case, it’s worse. Colorado’s terrible bill, California’s, Hawaii’s and other deep-fake regulatory violations of the First Amendment, and other examples illustrate that the states have very little business regulating a technology they don’t understand within a constitutional framework they seem to understand even less. .