In 1995, Newt Gingrich lobotomized Congress’s technical brain trust. It should be rebuilt.
It wasn’t so long ago that when a scary new technology burst onto the scene and raised uncomfortable new social questions, lawmakers knew just what to do: call their in-house tech think tank to get some perspective.
In 1974, Congress established the Office of Technology Assessment, a nonpartisan advisory body that provided independent analysis of new scientific and technological issues, from acid rain to polygraph test accuracy. The OTA made sure that if lawmakers were curious about a nascent technology, they had a good source of information besides the industry itself. It was educational, nonideological, and a resounding success.
This, of course, infuriated the conservative movement. As part of the 1994 “Contract with America,” then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich shuttered the OTA the following year, striking a crucial blow for ignorance, bias, and deference to private industry. Today, six of the largest technology companies collectively employ one lobbyist for every 1.5 members of Congress. Layer on the gutting of local newsrooms due to a Google- and Meta-dominated ad market, plus a handful of legacy outlets now reshaped by tech billionaires with their own agendas, and Congress has very few trustworthy sources of information.
The result is a Congress that is frequently befuddled about technical matters, a problem that has seldom been more obvious than when it comes to so-called frontier artificial intelligence products. On September 8, an Anthropic employee named Jacob Coxon publicly resigned and called for a nationwide “slowdown” in the development of these AI models, claiming that these products could wipe out humankind by the end of the decade if we aren’t careful.
Sounds bad! Maybe Congress should step in and put the kibosh on this whole endeavor? Or is the whole thing just a publicity stunt to drive valuations even further? As it stands, Congress isn’t really equipped to answer these questions. Apparently, the only one who knows how to organize and regulate AI … is the AI industry itself.
This article was originally published in The American Prospect. Continue reading (paywall-free) on the original site.