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Artificial Intelligence Will Merely Kill Us, Not Take Our Jobs

A prominent recent development in governance of artificial intelligence is the White House Office of Management and Budget’s 2020 Guidance for Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Applications (Federal Register Doc. 2020–00261, Filed 1–10–20), directed at heads of federal executive branch agencies, in fulfillment of Trump E.O. 13859 and building upon it. While the directive strikes the right tone in some instances, it opens the door to federal agencies too widely for oversight. Top-down federal funding and governance of scientific and technology research will be increasingly incompatible with a future of lightly regulated science and technology specifically, and with limited government generally. First is the the lack of concern that a key driver of investment and in turn trajectory of the sector is military and intelligence-based. Not to be flip about it, but when it comes to robotics and military, the concern is that Isaac Asimov’s widely famous but fictional Laws of Robotics (devised to forbid the harm of humans) are programmed out, not in. This is a part of what makes fusion of big government and private AI deployment problematic at the outset. 
 
Second is the insufficient appreciation of the extent to which the broader progressive regulatory bureaucracy at which the guidance is aimed holds a vision of “rule of law” entirely at odds from a more classical liberal frame of reference. Today’s administrative state has its own set of value pursuits and visions, of what are costs and what are benefits, and the sources of each. 
 
Make no mistake, the new AI guidance constitutes a set of regulatory principles rather than laissez-faire, property rights based principles, especially as they will be interpreted by less market-oriented administrations that later assume the helm and the agencies they direct. The White House guidance invites agencies to “consider whether a change in regulatory policy is needed due to the adoption of AI applications in an already regulated industry, or due to the development of substantially new industries facilitated by AI.” Unless externally restrained, a regulatory bureaucracy’s inclination is to answer the question, “Is there call for regulation?” in the affirmative, and this guidance does not restrain that impulse but adds to it. For example: 
 
Agencies are instructed to produce “Statutory Authorities Directing or Authorizing Agency Regulation of AI Applications” and to “List and describe any statutes that direct or authorize your agency to issue regulations specifically on the development and use of AI applications.” But no statutory definition of AI even existed at the time any such supposed predicates came to be. 
 
The guidance is favorable toward antitrust regulation. 
 
The guidance invites social policy regulatory experimentation. 
 
The guidance may undermine simultaneous reforms from the Trump administration to restrain the overuse of these very sort of sub-regulatory guidance measures to influence the private sector. 
 
Given public policy fears, real and imagined, over artificial intelligence, it is an area ripe for political predation. While big science need not entail big government; the alignment of forces in play at the moment implies that it likely will.