Can voters learn to stop worrying and love Big AI?

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who told me he uses chatbots “all the time,” appears confident Republicans are misplaying their hand with the AI industry. Americans have reason to feel that the AI revolution is “something that is happening to them, not for them,” Schiff told me. “AI industry leaders themselves have been clear about the need for federal safeguards. Unenforceable voluntary commitments and self-regulation will not cut it.”

A few Tuesdays earlier, the mood at the White House had been considerably more celebratory. President Trump hosted a who’s who of tech titans in Washington, D.C., for the signing of an AI safety pact. (Sorry, superintelligence or “SI.”) The meeting yielded what Trump called a “morally binding” agreement to develop AI for the common good. The means of securing this happy outcome is to entrust the industry to “self-police” and “self-regulate” rather than face federal regulation.

Will Americans accept an industry’s freedom to remake their lives as the price of national greatness? Trump has made that bet on his party’s behalf — a stark contrast, at least in rhetoric, to what he said back in June. Asked about Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) proposal for public ownership of AI, he said, “There’s something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public,” according to the Associated Press. Trump also told reporters that his voters and Sanders’s “aren’t that far apart” on economics. If that much is true, then — as some Republican candidates are now discovering — the promise of American supremacy should offer limited comfort to Americans who suspect they’ll........

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