This Monday, DTN steps back from the state and local technology stories we typically shine a light on and take a look at how the national debate may be helping, or hamstringing, the country and Virginia.
The piece that may best capture the precarious place we find ourselves is not the latest tech-bro hyperventilation about AI espoused by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk, nor is it the roll out of yet another batch of laws to get control of data centers by Virginia Rep. Suhas Subramanaym.
Rather, it comes from the Atlantic’s Toluse Olorunnipa, whose piece suggests that AI is outrunning our political system.
“… technological advances and grassroots sentiment,” he writes, “have been moving faster than politicians have been willing to act.”
The result — everyone is playing catchup with no clear direction about where to go. The question, however, is: Are any of the legislative fixes, from oversight to moratoria to federal guidelines to government control of AI, really going to make a difference?
“Democratic and Republican political strategists I spoke with said that the likelihood of bipartisan cooperation to properly govern AI is slim at best,” Olorunnipa said. At fault?
“’People are deeply cynical and deeply skeptical, and then you add into that this moment of severe economic disruption,’ Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist, told me. ‘The politicization and the polarization is lighter fluid on top of that.’”
At the same time that U.S. can’t seem to get out of first gear, England is two years in to designating data centers as “Critical National Infrastructure.” According to the press release, granting CNI status means “data housed and processed in UK data centres – from photos taken on smartphones to patients’ NHS records and sensitive financial investment information – is less likely to be compromised during outages, cyber attacks, and adverse weather events.”
How well this is actually working is certainly worth exploration, but seeing a government embrace the challenge before it and try to secure it is certainly more desirable that the challenge before the U.S. now.
Olorunnipa’s article is worth a read.
