You have to have a federal rule and regulation. We can’t stop [AI] with politics. We can’t stop it with foolish rules and even stupid rules. At the same time, we want to have rules, but they have to be smart. They have to be brilliant. They have to be more brilliant than even the technology itself.
President Donald J. Trump, Remarks at “Winning the AI Race”
The risk of state overregulation of AI has been a focus of my writing since almost literally the beginning of Hyperdimensional. I had the great honor of sitting in the audience this past July when President Trump acknowledged this danger and called for a federal framework to preempt state AI regulation.
We need rules, the President told us, rules more brilliant than AI itself—a great way of framing the challenge at hand. I knew this would be a major challenge when I was in government, and since leaving my doubts about the political prospects of federal preemption have only grown. We are profoundly divided about what AI is, what it should be, what it could be, and what it will be. It is difficult to reach common answers in our current discursive environment.
And that is fine; there are many unanswered questions about AI, and we do not need to answer them all now. It is justifiable, perhaps even the American way, to take more incremental steps in the near term.
