As emerging and exciting new technologies develop, and before you can say Jack Robinson, individuals, in search of their fifteen minutes of fame, come out of the woodwork to say the sky is falling. Don’t fly in that plane! Don’t sail in that ship!
Then of course, the harum-scarum crowd says we need new government regulations on the emerging business which is followed by the inevitable claim the new industry needs to be taxed.
It's happened before to the railroad industry, the car industry, the medical industry and others. Government steps in as if they have all the answers.
Some years ago, as the cable industry was emerging, bureaucrats at the Federal Communications Commission were explicitly told cable was beyond the reach of government control, but this did not stop the control freaks at the FCC from writing a 600-page document schooling the cable companies on what they could and could not do.
The Cato Institute issued a report recently on how LOCAL government has thrown monkey wrenches into private businesses. “Many American cities suffer from political corruption. New York City was cited (naturally) for its housing authority demanding bribes from vendors in exchange for no bid building maintenance contracts.”
The mayor of Scranton, PA was a real beauty. Mayor Bill Courtwright “directed city official to ‘hold up licenses, permits or contracts to extort cash and campaign contributions from entities doing business in or with the city.’” Courtwright “threatened economic harm” to businesses if they refused to play ball with him. He got seven years in prison but the problem is, so many government bureaucrats get away with it.
And that just scratches the surface. We’ve all seen roads repaved that don’t need repaving, new schools built when the old school worked just fine; the problem was the teachers and yes, indifferent parents. Each government has its own unnecessary commissions to “study” some form of malady, when in truth, there is not a problem, yet millions are wasted.
A headline in Politico recently said, “Will Washington check AI?” Another said “Inside the Democrat’s AI Strategy.” We all know what that means. Politico is the Bible for the inside-the-Beltway elitist crowd. Already, government interference is proceeding or in the planning stages. Obama just recently called for a uniform Democrat strategy on AI.
Let’s face it; all government is more or less corrupt. The first rule of the bureaucracy is to defend the bureaucracy. And while all of the Democrat Party is corrupt, many in the GOP are corrupt too. It’s just that more honesty can be found in the conservative segment of Republicanism than in the Democrat Party.
Now, both sides are saying, with regard to Artificial Intelligence, we need government oversight, controls, regulations. In the strange bedfellow category, Senator Bernie Sanders and Steven Bannon are joining up to call for the regulation of AI.
Inevitably and unfortunately, the call is rising for government to regulate AI. One agenda-driven individual says AI will kill all of us in the next ten years! This summons up the hysterical cries of the global warming crowd, who, thirty years ago said NYC and other cities would be underwater in ten years.
The goals actually are to impose more regulations and increase taxes, some of which the hysterical crowd have already and unfortunately reached.
This time though, we must not succumb to the “sky is falling crowd.”
Author Craig Shirley is a Reagan biographer and presidential historian. His new book, Upheaval---about the 2024 Trump campaign--- is due out in January of 2027.
