AI on Our Terms

Owning the most powerful technology in human history does not give a company the right to own humanity itself—or put our democracy in danger.

AI is already one of the most powerful tools humans have ever built, and its impacts might soon outrun our best and worst imaginations. The people in power right now owe something to every generation that follows: set the rules that protect us from its harms, and be clear about the society we want AI to make possible.

AI is several different issues wrapped into one. While Silicon Valley and Washington treat AI as a distinct phenomenon, most Americans experience it as an accelerant of forces we have faced for years—the automation of our jobs, the dopamine and screen addiction of our kids, and the loss of our privacy. Add in a surge in state surveillance, climate change, the concentration of wealth and power in fewer unaccountable hands, and the erosion of our common humanity.

America needs a national strategy on AI—in fact, an international strategy—and we need it fast.

If used for the common good, AI can accelerate breakthroughs in medicine, clean energy and conservation, and even manage your inbox. But the current leadership in Washington has not done the job. Worse, they are trying to stop red states and blue states from protecting their own people through a disastrous policy known as federal preemption, which would block states from setting guardrails and liability on AI even when Washington has put nothing in their place. The people building AI are begging to be regulated. Washington's answer is to block the states from doing it.

The clearest moral leadership so far has come from Pope Leo. In the first major letter of his papacy, he wrote: “Technology is never neutral. It takes on the character of the people who build it, pay for it, and write the rules for it.”

The question is who decides. Big Tech wants the answer to be whoever spends the most money. They have amassed a war chest of over $100 million to buy the midterm elections. They have gone after candidates with the courage to demand AI safety, and they are bankrolling candidates who promise them a blank check through federal preemption. That is not right, and it is not inevitable.