Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) is something of a gadfly to Silicon Valley. Even in his days as Missouri's Attorney General, he investigated the likes of Google for violating state consumer-protection laws. In an editorial published online recently by the journal of religion and public life First Things, he stakes out an existential claim that artificial intelligence (AI) is the defining technology of our day, and threatens to break the founding covenant of the United States: to hold respect for persons made in the image of God supreme over considerations of money and power.
One way he proposes to do this is through passage of a proposed GUARD Act, designed to protect children from the depredations of AI that have led to sexual exploitation, depression, and even suicide in many cases. Co-authored with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, the act would impose strict age verification to prevent those under 18 from accessing certain AI systems, prohibit systems that are known to promote sexual and violent acts directed at oneself or others among young people, and impose severe meaningful penalties for violations of these regulations. The bill has been approved by the Senate's Judiciary Committee and awaits action by the full Senate and House.
While the GUARD Act would go far in the direction of preventing some of the most horrific side effects of the AI revolution we are now living in, it addresses only the tip of an iceberg of threats that Hawley perceives. In the editorial, Hawley outlines the history of the United States, beginning not with 1776, but with the 1630 voyage of the Puritans led by John Winthrop from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Opinions differ as to whether the noble sentiments in a sermon delivered during that trip amounted to an actual covenant agreed to by the refugees, or simply aspirations that were not universally shared. But details aside, Hawley traces the same spirit of democracy guided by Christianity through Lincoln's Homestead Act granting 160 acres of public land to all comers, Samuel Gompers' promotion of the 8-hour workday, and the twentieth century's adoption of social insurance of various kinds.
Opposed to this tendency to regulate economic and technical innovations for the good of all is a progressive notion that the modern world is too complex to leave its governance to the masses. Hawley proposes what he calls "covenant economics" in opposition to the government-by-expert notions promoted during the Progressive Era and exemplified by the takeover of the economy by Woodrow Wilson during World War I. Nowadays, he points out, the progressive elite in government and the economic elite who runs Silicon Valley are largely the same class, and are working to make the country "K-shaped." Meaning, a few lucky people go up one bar of the K and get to run everything and own most of everything, while the unlucky masses have to take the lower arm, which is whatever the elites dish out for them, whether it's unemployment checks compensating for losing one's job to AI or new and fun ways to amuse oneself to death.
Hawley is under no illusions that his own party is going to avert this crisis any better than the Democrats. He makes no reference to the Trump administration, but he doesn't have to, as it's clear to anybody with working eyes by now that Trump favors Trump, and to hell with everybody else.
But one of the primary Christian virtues is hope. Only by continuing to take the machinery of government seriously can people like Sen. Hawley make a difference: drafting laws, passing them in the face of opposition, and rallying like-minded people to just causes. The prospects for the GUARD Act in a climate in which President Trump has endorsed a laissez-faire attitude toward AI are not good. But things can change, and if it passes it will be one small step in the direction of covenant economics, and away from the domination of average people by a small, super-powerful elite who increasingly seem to think they live on a different planet than the rest of us.
Sen. Hawley is right to look to history for precedents of covenant economics. What I'd like to see from history is a precedent for our present situation: one in which a megalomaniacal political leader is largely in cahoots with a small upper class of very wealthy and powerful individuals who dominate politics as well as economics, and how the population of that country got out from under domination.
One has to go back to the days of Louis XVI, the last king of France before the Revolution of 1792 abolished the monarchy, to find a similar divide between the ruling classes and the rest of the population. Ironically, Louis's downfall was caused partly by his adoption of what we would now call liberal ideas, such as supporting the rebellion of the American colonies.
Revolutions are always a last resort, and nothing I write here should be construed as advocating for one. Once a revolution starts, even its promoters can't tell where it's going to end up—it's like the boys in Mark Twain who started a boulder rolling down a hill just to see what it would do. As long as the creaky democratic machinery of the U. S. Constitution still works, we should use it to move things in directions that put into practice the idea the country was founded on: in Lincoln's deathless words, that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
In one sense, regulation of AI is like nailing Jell-O to the wall. It's everywhere, changing all the time, and a key problem in legislating about it is getting enough of a handle on it to say something that will last longer than a few months. But the pernicious effects of AI are clear enough: the loss of jobs by millions of people who have done nothing wrong other than not to be born to privilege; the fear, whether justified or no, that the proliferation of data centers is creating burdens of higher electric and water rates as a byproduct of rich people getting even richer; and the harm that AI can do to children and teenagers. Sen. Hawley wants to draw lines in the sand that tell AI's promoters "here, and no farther." We can pray that his efforts will be joined by other legislators of good will to turn the vast tide of AI in a direction that will benefit all the citizens of the United States, and not just continue to enrich a few at the cost of the many.
Sources: Sen. Hawley's essay is on the First Things website at https://firstthings.com/the-american-covenants-answer-to-ai/. I also referred to an AI summary (!) of the GUARD Act and Wikipedia articles on John Winthrop and Louis XVI. AI isn't all bad. . . .
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